Autumn — Portrait of Lydia Cassatt (Mary Cassatt 1880), by Aaron Fischer

Portrait of Lydia Cassatt, by Mary Cassatt (USA) 1880

Autumn — Portrait of Lydia Cassatt (Mary Cassatt 1880)

You were your almost-famous sister’s 
favorite model, posed on a mint-green park bench,
shawled in a blanket. 

It’s the coldest Impressionist painting I know, 
colder than Monet’s sun-scrubbed Haystacks in Winter

but that’s because I know too much. 
Your black bonnet and knotted scarf, those 
knitted gloves, the way your sister 

tucked the blanket around your lap and legs 
with more than sisterly concern 

for the damp chill rising off the Seine … You’re dying,
your failing kidneys 
flooding your body with the toxic waste

of being alive — your pale, precisely limned face, 
both cheeks lightly kissed with fever flush,

the only still point in the painting.
Seven years Mary’s senior, 
you were her designated chaperone in Paris

once she decided America had nothing 
left to teach her about art.

Dutiful, first-born daughter
of Philadelphia’s upper crust, 
free to learn nothing 

more practical than knitting and needlepoint.
Mary painted you at both, blank canvas 

she turned to again and again,
crocheting in the garden wearing a gauzy white
frilled bonnet and French blue dress, 

or sitting at a tapestry loom, keeping
a careful eye on the work at hand, 

while the dark wall and window dissolve
in a bright white column 
that’s beginning to claim 

a sturdy, lathe-turned table leg.
A more ominous dissolve stopped me 

the first time I saw you 
on your green bench: Mary’s scraped 
and reworked the bottom of your blanket

until it’s the same reds and sulfur
of the bare flower bed, painting you

out of the picture. But is it from grief
at losing you or rage at what’s taking you 
from her? Or had she discovered 

there’s no difference? 

Aaron Fischer

​Aaron Fischer’s poems have appeared in the American Journal of Poetry, Five Points, Hudson Review, and elsewhere. He won the 2020 Prime Number Magazine poetry contest, 2023 Connecticut poetry prize, 2023 Naugatuck River Review poetry prize, and the Maria W. Faust sonnet contest. He’s been nominated for a 2024 Pushcart.