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Poems After Balthus, by Lenore Myers

10/20/2023

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The Blanchard Children (1937) 

www.wikiart.org/en/balthus/children-1937

They are still 
children, blanched 
in earth
shades. Outsized, 
they shroud
the table, floor. Dour 
walls enclose
stiff forms. Little 
light, no 
shared glances. 

Thérèse, hard
at work
above the composition 
book--her 
face, the pages, 
blank. 

Body
rigid, stretched 
canvas. 

Something doesn’t fit
the boundary, escapes-- 
barely, 
a girl’s foot.  

Hubert’s eye 
closed--or is it 
wide 
open beneath 
the smudge? 

In the dark the eye
unfastens, 
seeing
and unseeing, both,
dreams 
that coarse, 
crumpled sack
behind 
the scene.   

**

Still Life (1937)

https://www.wikiart.org/en/balthus/still-life-1937

One evening’s simple
meal refracted 
into reds and blues 
and greens, strange
geometries 
of what we think 
and what we think 
we see. Unremarkable 
potato, bread, and water
on a desk meant for writing. Repast 
of an artist, circles, 
rectangles, triangulated
hues assembled like schoolgirls,
mannerly for the moment, the chair, 
the crockery, cloth draped 
the Dutch way--but 
poor, coarse canvas. 
Composed feints: 
dull skin prodded 
by a fork, a side of boiled 
potato vanishes 
behind the carafe--or 
here, the execution 
of glass decanter shattered 
at the neck. Be it 
disobedient
materials or something more
out of hand, 
the artist’s ire 
draws vessel to joiner’s 
hammer, makes 
a feast of tears.
The cloth, the wall, the table 
limned in red--
thrust 
of knife-point into bread.
And hammer, lying
like an untoward comment 
made by one friend
to another, a little funny, 
and a little 
mean. Is the subject 
overpainted?
Anyway 
one wants to look,
unobtrusive 
glass untouched, still
pristine. 

**

Thérèse Sur une Banquette (1939)

https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-balthus-therese-sur-une-banquette-6202444/?from=salesummary&intobjectid=6202444&lid=1

Thérèse on the bench seat 
tilts, one hand 
lifting, 

pulls 
from her black plaid skirt
centimetre by centimetre,

frees
a single, slender 
thread.

Shadow
behind her--depth’s 
silent 

accomplice. Rapt 
in Peter Pan collar and white 
knee-highs, 

Thérèse on the bench seat 
illuminates 
the ochre-dark. In perfect captivity

of the moment,
one could almost forget
war is coming, 

then marriage at nineteen, 
and illness, and.... But no! 
Her red sweater says, 

“Attendez!” 
The canvas hangs on
her slipping-

down socks, crumpled 
collar, slipping-up 
skirt, her 

every fiber, caught.
Alarming
to see 

that unrelenting 
tug at a fragile 
strand,  

a little criminal to want
to pull.
Only eleven years 

remain. 
Inside the frame,
she lies

beyond 
here, now, 
drawing the thread 

endlessly, endlessly bright
wisp 
of thread 

tenuous, 
against the dark, 
unfinished--

**

La Victime (1938-1946)

https://www.wikiart.org/en/balthus/the-victim

My artist enters through the broken door. 
Hands tremble, touching brushes, rags. 
(But never me. No.) Still cigarette-long, thin, 
a voice like ash--when he bothers to speak. 
He sets the pitcher on the table, drops
the cloth. The palette is prepared. We’ll be 
here for ages.
                          But who would sit for this? 
Some unclothed woman propped up headless, gray, 
askew as if discarded? Or lost?
Not me. I never sat for him like that.
Those arms, those legs--something isn’t right.
Body pitched, rough at the edges, bare 
sheet fraying…? 
                                       My artist turns pale, 
grips his stomach, bends. See, he is not well. 
He carried men across the line at Maginot
--well, what was left of men. Every night 
the dead returned, mute, gaping. Every night 
he screamed awake, a mess of tears and sweat,
till one day he, too, stepped wrong: Click, he stopped--
slag blasted guts, another caught the brunt. 
Moaning on the field, “Oh, my angel--”
             Angel! He thought his vision was of me!
“My little angel,” was what he’d said—me, 
who twisted Hubert’s arm until welted,
red, his face like crumpled paper--“O! O!”
--I never said that I was sorry. Oh,
my brother, I was, I am. An angel, 
Hubert--he’ll stay beside me to the end.
“The past remains within us, an affliction”; 
my artist says this now. An affliction. 
Is this what I’ve become? He sees himself 
in everything. My little artist, victim  
of a force that’s broken us to pieces-- 

Blow men and violins to bits, but leave
the trees, the country in its silence, green
and golden, velvet stillness of the hills.   
A life I never knew. 
                                      And what of this 
body, blush abandoning its soft, 
sweet hull, breasts and thighs  
mottling under loamy browns and grays? 
My artist draws the knife upon the floor, 
extends the handle past the frame--me, you 
accuses? Her arms stretch up, unresisting.  
She does not touch me, no. What, that morbid
tangle--? Nothing like my body! And yet 
that face--gray, like a sickness in his brush
emerging, heavy-lidded, blotched as if 
with filth and rain.… Don’t turn away, please, don’t
go, forget this stiffening body, face  
an afterthought: Don’t let this be my own--   

                     (Thérèse Blanchard, 1925-1950)


**

Thérèse (1938)

https://www.wikiart.org/en/balthus/th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se-1938

She’s composed now, just 
manipulations 
of light and shadow, 
and colour, convincing 
the mind you can touch

The girl in the adult
chair, sunk in
the room, her face 
a sallow window 
on a closed 
interior. Her gaze 
brushes past 
you, and me,

Self forgotten
as a dream. Electric 
illusion of slight 
hand resting lightly 
on the knee--ah,

Glossy pink 
remnant of brush 
stroke at her cheek.
But the canvas 
is really board--

Turning 
green and sour, 
acidic in disrepair.
Still, life might be 
captured 

In a chair, 
viewed 
and viewer, rapt 
in time, its clicking,
mindless chambers.

​Lenore Myers

A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Lenore Myers' award-winning poems and essays have appeared in LIT, Southern Indiana Review, One, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. My limited-edition chapbook, Regards to Balthus, is forthcoming this summer from Seven Kitchens Press. She teaches English to recent immigrants in Northern California.


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