From a distance, he makes something of me.
Even in the scant light of that darkness

my flesh burns as if his colors were true.
When he finishes, I step into the bath

naked, and he watches me as he has
the others, unspeaking, almost dead-eyed.

What are those behind me? Flowers.
He’d say it doesn’t matter what they are,

only what he makes of them. And I break
the water with my left foot, underside

of my right knee slipping down the porcelain
incline, right hand steadied by a towel

slung across the tub’s lip. I remember
how dark came, and the radiance of sheets.

My friend accompanied me to Vollard—I hoped
she could keep her face impassive. I wore

a stylish hat like that American woman
he painted once in the Louvre, her arm

long and slender as a closed umbrella.
Should commerce have kept me aloof?

I never was, from the first afternoon
he guided my leg to that angle, and bent

my nakedness until I looked like a jockey
mounting. Afterward, I unbuttoned him

and slid my hand in, pulling with my teeth
at the burnished hair near his shoulder.

We took each other between sheets
he later charcoaled. To the plain wooden bed

and its roil of orange hanging he gave half
the canvas, leaving the shadows for me

to step from air to water, from him
back into myself. I won’t say what we did

that I wanted again and again, only
what grief I felt in his wanting, which I see

now in others he painted, women
who come to him, undress for money,

and step in and out of water. My face,
praise God, is barely visible in the sedge

of paint. But I was not ashamed, even when
I lay on the floor and he touched me

with his foot. It was as if we were animals.
Look at the bath. What fills it isn’t water

but a wild smudged black, as in the countryside
when night rises, beginning at the ground.