Matisse Loves Cookies, by Shelley Benaroya

Open Window, Collioure, by Henri Matisse (France). 1905.

Matisse Loves Cookies
                
"The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes."
- Eugene Delacroix

An invisible curl, snap,
the chocolate-assed florentine.  Her game
had rules.  The wads
of pfeffernusse between
tallman and thumb, the logic
with which she handled
hermits, opened her fingers
like a beach of shortbread
gritty and malleable
after a rain, charmed
even the most awkward
around children.  Uncontainable
now, my daughter rises naked and
wolfish from her crib,
no doubt swept up by
a likely squall of ginger,
a twister of Madame Bu Wei's Dot Hearts,
some prodigious chaos so unlike

the calm of Matisse's "Open Window."
From her high chair, she regards
its dock and geraniums rising over
the sill of our dining room table.
Her hands relax
beside a half-eaten apricot.
Matisse loves cookies, she says.
Not that the spars of ships
flicking in the pink
harbour could be mistaken
for langue de chat, or that
the strokes
of ivy 
about the parapet,
the bluegrass wall,
clay baking
on the salt sea ledge seemed
to her - iced
like a tray of Christmas spritz.                                                           

Perhaps, she sees the artist himself seated
in his room of fluent
morning light.  He works 
on an empty stomach but
the smell of the Mediterranean
is sweeter than anise
and he is tempted
to run downstairs for a snack.
Almost crazy with desire, suppose
he ducks behind his canvas,
knowing the cookie eludes him.

Shelley Benaroya

This poem was previously published in Edison Literary Review, Fall 2004.

Shelley Benaroya is founding director and teaching artist for the Writing Center for Creative Aging (www.writingcenterforcreativeaging.org). Her poetry has appeared in Diner, The Edison Literary Review, Ekphrasis, The Lyric, Mobius, Thirteenth Moon, and elsewhere.  In 2017, she received the Ekphrasis Prize and a Pushcart Prize nomination.