POUR, TEAR, CARVE

August, Rue Daguerre

By Lindsay Bernal

—after Joan Mitchell’s August, Rue Daguerre, 1957

Say you’re walking in circles in soggy espadrilles, 
your raincoat with the broken zipper insufficient 

against this weather, its inconvenience.
Rain in summer seems a kind of disaster, 

Bowen writes years earlier.
Or perhaps you like the cliché of it, 

matted-down hair, see-through garments, 
your face a mess. Montparnasse, 

to which you‘ve fled twice––
at your analyst’s urging––blotted out, 

as strange as Stevens’s hemlock,
emptied of everyone but the New Yorkers.

No, it’s not a happy day at the market, 
your love feeding you blackberries 

from his blueish hands. Your love’s 
in Rockland State, your love’s evasion’s 

killing you, you’re pregnant 
until you’re not pregnant,

inconsolable in your drop-clothed atelier 
prolonging the period before painting, 

looking out windows, looking in.

Lindsay Bernal is the author of What It Doesn't Have to Do With (University of Georgia Press, 2018), winner of the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Conjunctions Online, the Georgia Review, New England Review, Oversound, Poem-a-Day, and other journals. She coordinates the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.