I Run into Camille Claudel at the Rodin Museum, by Wendy Kagan

Perseus and the Gorgon, by Camille Claudel (France) 1905

I Run into Camille Claudel at the Rodin Museum

Don’t let these prim, shining halls fool you— 
the work was born of plaster dust & wet loam,
sour sweat & tang of metal in our mouths like blood.
Skin bits floated in slants of light like god particles.

To be a woman then was to be a laundress, 
cleaning up after greatness. I couldn’t do it. 
My hands needed to wrest feeling 
out of cold minerality. At 12, I sank my fingers 

into red clay from banks of the Seine, my starched 
petticoats earth-smeared, fingernail crescent 
moons caked thick with creation— from this, 
figures wormed to life, a night jungle menagerie

sprang from me. I never should have left,
become pupil, protégé, a kind of prey. There was 
no place in the atelier for my children of mud 
& stone, they were too alive for this world,

their faces ached, they didn’t behave as statues do, 
sitting still with their hands in their laps, obedient,
empty. They moved & breathed. Finally,
a great wave came for me— my family 

locked me away, they tried to snuff out 
the flame in my eyes, but it was too late, 
I had already unleashed my marble beasts
upon the land. Time undrowned me, 

washed me to shore. My huge Gorgon wings 
dried in the sun. They gave me a room here, 
have you seen it? My heart beats through rock
there, it is unstoppable. Through rock, I tell you.

Wendy Kagan

Wendy Kagan (she/her) lives in New York’s Catskill Mountain foothills. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, miniskirt magazine, The Poetry Distillery, Eunoia Review, The Hyacinth Review, and elsewhere. Wendy holds an MA in English from Columbia University. Her chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition.