Poetry Selection
A Slashed Painting by John Singer Sargent
John Matthias
The large Sargent painting, subsequently slashed,
Of my distant cousin Hoffman, Alice Green,
Was photographed in Paris by Michelle’s Studio
In 1910. Alice had complained of standing still
For hours at what Sargent called a “sitting,” and
That she was forced to bring, day after day,
The fresh roses herself. But he was who he was.
This would be a “Sargent,” after all, and grand
As it could be, grand as his pictures of the other
Ladies in her circle captured by the genius
Of his hand. Dab dab dab she heard, and Stand still
Will you please Miss Green, and Mind the rose.
She minded roses, was in fact allergic, just like
Monsieur Proust, and she had to dab dab dab
At her running nose with a little handkerchief she
Brought from her hotel. Three of them, in fact.
He asked her to open up the book he had brought her,
Place it on the table with the roses, read a poem.
Oh it was John Keats! Now look up! he said,
And gaze at the lawn through the magic casement
At a thing fled forever from its image in the poem.
It’s lost, he said, but you — I’ll save you for the ages
If you just stand still another hour, another month.
Tell me once again who this Hoffman is.
She wondered if she really knew. She would marry him
Of course, but she doubted that she loved him.
What did it matter, he was wealthier than she. He was
A (white) descendent of George Washington, and
He was paying for this portrait as a wedding gift.
Hoffman, that is, and not the father of her country –
If indeed it was her country any more, if indeed
He were the father of it. Hoffman had her reading
Aaron Burr and other members of the Founding Fops,
As he liked to say, telling her she’d make a better
Picture even than the Portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau.
I am a Washington, he said, but only on the side.
She didn’t know the oldest of old tales — A man of means,
My dear, and mean enough to many when he’d
Met them with the line he’d taken from the artist’s
Great new friend: You are a woman out of Henry James!
That had taken them exactly to this point and not beyond.
She stood. The artist dab dab dabbed. As yet she didn’t know
That Hoffman was an outrageous rake who stalked
The beautiful and famous through salons and country houses
And the continental spas. Standing tall and straight as
Archer’s arrow held in Eros’ hand, she didn’t know
He’d tell her all when every honest hour ticked beyond
The help of any art. Would he rip the white bodice
From her even whiter breasts while she, before she
Slashed the canvas worth a Whistler or Degas,
Looked into his smirking face and said My raffish
Mr. Crass: I leave an image only of an image.
Take it for a song — a kind of testament, a trespass.
*****
John Matthias is poetry editor of Notre Dame Review. He has published
some twenty-five books of poetry, translation, essays, and collaboration.
His most recent volumes of poetry are Kedging, Trigons and Who
Was Cousin Alice? and Other Questions from Shearsman Books (May, 2011).
www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/matthiasWWCA.html
“A Slashed Painting by John Singer Sargent” appeared in the Spring 2011 Issue 8 of Fifth Wednesday Journal.