Sketches from Lucian Freud
Paintings at the Tate, 2003

Love in the Afternoon

           Naples (Cézanne)

It's African heat, the servant brings drinks
And her wrap — tangerine, cerise — has loosened . . .

O darlin come in with your breeze
For all of us under the sailcloth

And the sun of her hat opens
The naked blue window of sky

Wakening the room, pressing olives
In the skin of the harvested man

Who turns on his elbow — to her, the new one,
And to his pale lover

Tending the saddle of his back, ginger-thick her hair
Her flanks melon-moist and also

As satiny as coffee, the sirocco rising
For their night to be held by the mirror.

           London (Freud)

An old sun, long since gone, has soured the walls.

Sweetie come here, turn around please.

An upturned velvet chair, as svelte as pubic hair,
Its steel little wheels still whirring.

What happened? You can see he does not know.
And the other woman who enters
Is hurrying not to show.

A floor as scarred as Keifer's railway yard,
The bed arc-lit. Who will ever make it?

Yet they want to know, they must,
Before they fuck
In more of the lime
Light.

Mother

                    . . . would give back to the son the mother's richness of feeling
                                                 — W.H. Auden, In Memory of Sigmund Freud

     1

Now that her lips are sewn
Into a purse of silence
He gives back in tenderness
The ferocity buried there.

In wisp and sliver of acid,
This is mother and metal,
The final print of one
Whose end is his new beginning.

     2

In colors made
For a Prussian winter afternoon,
There is a mortar and pestle
Under mother's chair
Waiting like a cat.

Further back
Against the wall
A naked woman sleeps
As if in hospital.

Mother and lover.
As if we might weigh
The souls of two women
Set down after pounding.

Neighbors say
Mother heard the other
Weeping behind the wall,
And both of you did nothing.

Now it's clear
You painted nakedness
With unstinting finesse
And finished with inconsolable care
The gnarled leather of mother's chair.

     3

Lying there
She shows her palms
Like a dog its soft belly
Long-lived for eiderdown,
Devoted to rest we might all have
One day in the earth
Under ruddy leaves.

She could have fallen
Utterly into his care,
But has a sideways look,
One he learned in her lair:
Watchful she is
As he surveys her dumb
Eloquence. They say she was mortally
Sad, but she has him concentrating,
A glad gardener.

My mother died in the face
Of public hospital clatter.
A seizure took her tongue,
And held mine. How we long
To say the important things
And are damned, said Brecht,
Because we do not.

Here, with pillow-whispers
And a composed brow,
The embroidery his prayer,
His muted palette matching hers,
A mother is allowed to rest
And recontain herself
For his sable care.

     4

Mother and nurse gray
Against the gray wall
The skin-colored blind
Paler than her face

That has the slow
Music of her chamber,
Some warmth of
Cooling shortbread.

In repose as usual
Prone for her son
With her eyes open
And shoes on.

Barry Hill
The Kenyon Review
New Series, Volume XXVIII Number 3
Summer 2006

Copyright © 2006 by The Kenyon Review
Authors hold the rights to their individual works.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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