In a doorway above the port of Nice,
brimming with the morning’s Matisses,
fruit and women lambent in solstice haze,
I filled myself once more:
three nectarines daubed with fresh cheese,
the juice stickying my arm,
my chin, my sunburned neck
as I leaned against apartment mailboxes, watching throngs
of tourists, influencer girls in gauzy dresses
drift past the bars, fedora brims tilted
to catch the golden hour light just so
across their burnished faces.
Such sameness in how
youth shimmers now! A billion eyes
catch this curated cascade
of a million lip-plumping, how-to-cheekbone videos,
replicate as gift-shop prints.
Hard to tell them apart,
or tell them how
your life will go on as your face succumbs,
your body slowly giving ground
to the deep call of earth under your feet,
that final skinny-down
that whittles us all to sameness.
Everywhere is a boneyard. All of Henri’s muses
beat us to it, rattling around here somewhere,
splotched with cobalt blue and Venice red,
what they saw, what they might have painted
lost with the bodies offered to his brush—
See me, they pled, make me
something new, and how he gazed:
his eyes went on
through their bodies
through the slow slide of light across the room,
how they cried out later, alone, claiming that gaze
as their own, their gasps pure color—now
his shining simulacra radiate from walls
as the moss creeps over their bones.
In the green tangle
above the port—once citadel, now cemetery—
the dead stare down at the gleaming hulks of yachts.
I watch a bored deckhand mash his cigarette
into a congealing slice of pizza,
and a girl taking a selfie
stops pouting her lips to check the image,
her face a moment unposed and uncertain.
Whose eyes do we crave? Whose faces
will we shed and then remake?
Whose bodies hold us tender as we change,
bear the truths of this fragrant, fragile skin?
From a doorway I will never darken again,
I see the port shimmer, I soak in the strange hot light.
The last nectarine gives beneath my tongue,
slides with sweat in a rivulet down my stomach,
fruit I will ripen into art.
I cannot see my face. It is doing something new.
