Still Life with Bride

Claude saw the truth in a white flash,
as a whole composition, fully grasped and horrible,
soaked as it was in love:

That his Camille in her blue blush
lay no longer warm or in pain—
that through her skin crept the slow suffusion
of colors he kept at hand—

That no one now but he would ever
recognize her as she should have been—
the beauty, young and merry,
swathed in a frosted windowpane of gauze,
with no gift of worry
her wedding permanently unveiling
her face surprised, delighted, beloved, to him
and the starry wheel of her heart
pressed so tight against her future that
he could see its outline on the satin bodice,
handsbreadth the shining waist
embroidered round with red bouquet,
the wedding roses scattered loose and swirling
from her arm’s loose curve, as she
exhausted by her day of panic and of joy
lies charmed and sleeping…

No one could see her as Claude saw,
or feel how the summer sky and the plum
selvage by the lake as they stole her face
provoked the sum of work and happiness
to thunderclap and fade away in his huge heart;

no one to know his life and grief
had always a loved and perfect shape.
He shut away the wordy explanations.
He tipped his dead wife’s brow toward the light,
and selected the first brush,
and dipped it in the paint.



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