Mademoiselle de Mérode

Sometime after the second war

she relents. She has no intention of selling,

or need to. Perhaps a bequest … Perhaps

she is simply bored with the attentions

of Death, the last lover, and even

the kindness of her husband, Wealth.

(Who has never failed to flatter

her canny disposition, which,

alone among girls she knew and has carefully

forgotten, attracted him.)

The man from the museum,

though an employee of the hateful Republic, is

a gentleman: ribbon of the Academy,

small beard. Kissing her hand,

he begins a chapter of his memoir.

By now she was a statue,

its lines a fractured relic of grace;

the clothes and jewels a monument

to mysteriously, unforgivably lost moments.

Reluctant to open the curtains,

she yields to flattery and pleas.

The rumored Renoir

is there, its paint as cracked as hers.

The Signac, about which she tells a surprising,

inadvertently touching story.

Each one a portrait. Few nudes.

And almost everything crap, soft-edged, en fleurs,

fourth-rate. In a roundabout way

(she’s enjoying this, but may bristle at any moment),

the man from the museum

inquires about the Lautrecs. “The cripple!” she exclaims.

“I didn’t like him.

He was so ugly himself, he made everything ugly.

He didn’t do me justice.”

About the author

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure (Story Line Press, 1986) and Happiness (Story Line Press, 1998), and two collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015) and Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, 2018). In print, Pollack’s work has appeared in Hudson Review, Southern Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Manhattan Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Main Street Rag, Miramar, Chicago Quarterly, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Poetry Quarterly Review, Magma (UK), Neon (UK), Orbis (UK), and elsewhere. Online, his poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Diagram, BlazeVox, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, and elsewhere.