They tell you with their stark solitudinous eyes
How much he loved them, women of all kinds,
Black haired, blondes, brunettes, redheads, how much he loved
To stare at them, paint them, take them to bed,
So many nights to make wet with absinthe,
So many colleagues in vice, models
Of dissipation strewn across rumpled linen,
Real women with hair in their armpits
And generous pubes, getting up to casually piss,
Cantilevering a coy hand against a door frame
As they smoked. Even Jeanne who backed out
A window for him or Anna who shared
His brilliance, or any he painted and fucked,
Fucked and painted, scolded, mocked, their outrageous
Perfection sincere artifice like his weeping,
His self-cursed efforts to reform, kindle
A family, shouting Dante in the alleys
As bacilli roamed his brain. Their eyes say love,
But you know it was sex, and more sex, sex
Sometimes maybe as preamble to love, but sex
In the meantime, a binge of the dark other,
The handsome taboo, poor man, sybarite, Jew.
They did it for him. They said schtupping
Let him paint, relieved him of small frustrations,
No clothes, no heat, no food, and torrid rows,
Fought fire with fire, four, five times a day
Because he was obsessed and they were satisfied
Only a short while, spoiled, used to it,
Even the whores taking care of him for free.
It was unabashed madness, all wrong with all,
And if he’d lived he’d never have lasted.
He had to succumb to filth just to keep
His romantic reputation. He spread beauty’s legs
To bless it, sacrificed himself for the sake
Of creation like Dionysus, became with each nude
Dumb cliche, a shooting star, a fresh cut rose,
A pig in her mud, and out of unctuous sweat,
Those indiscriminate moans came not art but death,
And like a lover who wades into pants as
He lets the door click shut, he was gone, his scent,
His voice, his hopes. The paintings stand on their own.
—David Moolten
