PORTRAIT OF A LADY
Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze—or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
—as if that answered
anything. Ah, yes—below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore—Which shore?—
the sand clings to my lips—Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.
--
I read this over the weekend and could not get the tone or the story out of my mind. It has such underplayed eros, a sense of a long, almost contented sigh. I admit that I have never really appreciated the poems of Williams, but this one hits all marks. "Which shore? I said petals from an appletree." That, folks, is poetry.
Jean Froganard was a French artist from, 1684 - 1721; he painted The Swing, in which a girl loses a slipper, which is painted mid-flight. Jean Watteau was a Frech painter, 1732 - 1806. The two seem to be conflated, probably on purpose.
