Susan Varnot

Matisse: Seated Pink Nude

Such beauty when the flesh is lost

          and the face stirs

around itself, a bowl’s rim without features:

          no eyes no nose no mouth pearling

into speech or a kiss,

          no look fixed to a window

or to the rain flashing like pins,

          the body dissolving into white

with its hint of absence, the nothing

          inside the box, the air inside a vase.

Such beauty when the flesh becomes

          indefinite, the way the wind

stirs a field, grasses blurring,

          and erases the exact

lines in which form sleeps.