POEMS/ Tribute to a Long Love
Pierre Bonnard, Nude in the Bath, 1941
Tribute to a Long Love
after Pierre Bonnard’s “Nude in the Bath”
Still he paints her as a young nude
though she died at sixty in 1942.
She floats again in the same tub,
her body, pink with life, in a room so full
of light and air and color
that it too floats. Here gravity
and time have ceased to be--
floor and tub, blue, red, purple,
orange tiles, her little brown dog
curled up on the floor below her--
are all suspended in a collage
of dazzling paint, unanchored tub
drifting in a sea of luminosity.
Floating aloof, detached
her boyant body weightless,
she is lifted by her bath and looks
just as she did in 1925, the first time
he posed her bathing. Her faded year,
brushed brilliant by love’s constancy,
she is forever beauty’s truth.
From All Roads Go Where They Will (Antrim House, 2010)
after Pierre Bonnard’s “Nude in the Bath”
Still he paints her as a young nude
though she died at sixty in 1942.
She floats again in the same tub,
her body, pink with life, in a room so full
of light and air and color
that it too floats. Here gravity
and time have ceased to be--
floor and tub, blue, red, purple,
orange tiles, her little brown dog
curled up on the floor below her--
are all suspended in a collage
of dazzling paint, unanchored tub
drifting in a sea of luminosity.
Floating aloof, detached
her boyant body weightless,
she is lifted by her bath and looks
just as she did in 1925, the first time
he posed her bathing. Her faded year,
brushed brilliant by love’s constancy,
she is forever beauty’s truth.
From All Roads Go Where They Will (Antrim House, 2010)
