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The air was full of summer
and boys hurried to leave their sisters behind
as rudely as possible. Typical of home,
the helpful enmities of light and shade,
like the chiaroscuro on velvet
in those powerful paintings of famous saviors:
art is the mere manipulation of memory, after all.
It was a typical home, and the helpful
enmities of light and dark helped
fill the dutiful days of the wife,
the sleepy ignorance of the husband,
and the vigilant white-stoned fears of the children:
(consider the story of dark will versus lively intent,
the story of pathos and simple pleasure
derived from small events in a small town
several miles inland, full of mosquitoes
and rain, like afternoon television.
The story includes such scenes
as the changing line of lights,
the traffic lights on a Sunday evening
reflected in the rainy streets,
and other emblems of despair).
But since art is merely manipulation
after all, she watches her husband
at three in the morning sleeping,
she, having been abandoned by brothers,
a mother and a father, the System,
left alone with herself and her self,
her simple, memorable self, in the night
knows there is nothing to do but remember
and feel the flesh of one's own thigh
and wonder whether it is disease
made you what you are, or else
you take a warm bath and have a drink.
If you remember Art you remember men
watching women bathe,
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,
for instance, and the forty-eight years
between his single, torque-driven bather,
her broad back, and the later Turkish bath
of many women as if through a keyhole.
Or Delacroix, those Rirkish women bathed
in the woods, or Chassoriau,
whose bather sleeps like Gretel,
abandoned by her brother, too,
in the woods. Or Corot, that simple man,
whose naked bather ("La Thilettel" 1859)
brought her hairdresser along under the leafy
languorous larches. You can find
Spanish bathers by de la Peiia,
and any number ("The Woman in the Waves",
"Bathers," "Bather Sleeping by a Brook")
by Courbet. Even Millet's Goose Girl
has a naked left heel cooling in the pond.
Gerome, Bazile, Degas, Gleyre, Renoir,
Puvis de Chavannes, Gauguin, Cezanne,
and Guillaume-Adolphe Bouguereau,
all these men imagined women bathing
indoors and out, even seeing
these naked bathers sleeping, open air,
closed in their own memories
for the dangerous delight of men.
But what memory does she suffer, our wife,
bathing at three A.M., following her shining
way back into the dark wood?
The breast which emerged in sunlight
curves like limestone beneath her sleeplessness.
Driftings of forgetfulness descend
like shells of small animals to fit
the shape of ocean floor, or the vitreous
shape of the bathtub, white and domestic.
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