​On Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre, by Joshua St. Claire

Le Bonheur de Vie, by Henri Matisse (France) 1906

​On Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre

This is the world without once. This is the world without again.
An unseen scarlet sun burns away the golden hour
as pan pipes play what is remembered and forgotten.

This first and final afternoon has been unfolding for an aeon
as seedless fruit and fruitless thought bloom from sterile flowers.
This is the world without once. This is the world without again.

Upon the grass, the Graces we have no need of orbit on
while the sun is still. Lionless lambs hold us rapt in their power,
lording over what is remembered and forgotten.

A knot of hair in ivy flames. Ambergris suspended in a lavender ocean.
No makers of monuments beyond a belly for meadow or a twig for a tower.
This is the world without once. This is the world without again.

Distance is dead. Flesh is fire. Touch is tintinnabulation.
Omphaloskepsis exhausts itself in a sunshower.
What is left? What have we remembered and forgotten?

The still world rocks with the force of fingers through hair and the motion
of light as it lingers. Timeless time creates what it devours:
the world without once and the world without again.
Only passacaglia and prism are remembered and forgotten.

Joshua St. Claire

This was first published in The Scop.

Joshua St. Claire is an accountant from a small town in Pennsylvania. His poetry has been published or are forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Lana Turner, and Allium, among others. His haiku have appeared in several annual anthologies. He is the winner of Rattle: Poets Respond, the Gerald Brady Memorial Senryu Award and the Trailblazer Award. He firmly believes that the interrobang should be added to the standard keyboard.