After Matisse’s Back Series, by Yael Herzog

The Back Series, by Henri Matisse (France) 1908-1931

After Matisse’s Back Series

I
Yesterday, I hiked a narrow
hidden path to the frozen 
waters of Lake Helen. Still, 
they were fluid, distant. I grazed 
my body along her curve and this
must have been the way you were blinded. 
Scooping earth from the waysides
of her belly, cupping it in the crescents 
of your palms, nearing so close
to your lips as to melt it with 
your breath. This way, you could lean 
yourself into the valley of her back, slide 
over the rise of her thighs 
and whisper the strokes of perfection 
like a tourist, with hiking poles and an 
oversized backpack, stunned 
by the foreignness, the relevance
of beauty.


II
Too stunned, almost, to unload
your pack and stay 
the night in its curvature, its mystified 
bend. The morning appears and the lines 
that the evening weight contours
seem more jagged at this hour. Like this, 
the trees themselves grow thick: A neck 
speared through the blades of an open back,
its leaves, folding, more than blowing, into  
themselves, out of themselves. 


III
I do not blame you for the blindness. It is 
hard to tell beauty from the backside 
of a stone, a lake, a day. I envy 
your strength, uprooting 
the tree like that, carrying the trunk 
down through the leaning path, away 
from the frozen body and evening
and dawn. The way you must 
have lifted it above your head,
thrust it with such a force 
as to rip apart the firm of her back
and leave it there.

IV
Though by now you must be 
an exhausted traveler, having already 
woken in the break 
of the day to watch the ways in which 
sunlight traces and pools, you 
are comforted in the subtleties of stillness. 
She has become two pillars and you,
an artist, unforming.

Yael Herzog

Yael Herzog: "I have received my MFA from Bar Ilan University, and received the Andrea Moriah Poetry Prize in May, 2017. My work has previously been published in Eclectica Magazine and Aurora Poetry, and was nominated for the Sundress Publications 2019 Best of the Net Anthology. I grew up in New Jersey and now live in Tel Aviv, Israel, where I teach English to middle school and high school students.



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