​Jo Hiffernan: La Belle Irlandaise, by Kate Fox

La Belle Irlandaise, by Gustave Courbet (France) 1866

​Jo Hiffernan: La Belle Irlandaise

Who in her right mind wouldn’t trade Symphony in White, No. 1:
The White Girl for the candor of L’Origine du Monde? Or the chance
to entwine milky limbs with Helène Clareaux under Prussian blue 
canopies, pearls spilling across pink sheets, portrait vase agape 
 
with roses, ivorine hair combs loose in the bedclothes?
When Whistler saw Courbet’s finished canvas, he dropped
you for the parlour maid, but you arranged to keep their son 
for yourself and your hand in the business. Years later, 
 
Freer remembered you at Whistler’s funeral, “…I saw the thick 
wavy hair…although it was streaked with gray, I knew at once 
it was Johanna,… ‘la belle Irlandaise…’ ” come to pay her last 
respects. You remembered how Whistler and Swinburne 
 
dismissed you as “soft snows that hard winds harden.” 
But not Courbet, who caught you with that cascade of russet 
in one hand and a mirror in the other—no comb, no reflection, 
just your sensible gaze, appraising eye, self-possessed, ready.

Kate Fox

Kate Fox's work has appeared the New OHIO Review, Great River Review, KROnline, Pleiades, and other literary journals, and she has published two chapbooks: The Lazarus Method through Kent State U Press, and Walking Off the Map through Seven Kitchens Press. She lives in Athens, Ohio, with her partner, Bob DeMott, and two English Setters.