The Terrace, St. Tropez Poem by michael hogan

A girl reclining by an open window.
I do not say this way
the only thing one saw that day.
There was a strip of luminous green,
pale and cool suggesting the sea,
or moss on wooden shutters.
But if on a white canvas I mark down
some sensation of blue or green,
each stroke diminishes the one preceding.
So you see there was, first of all, a girl.
I, bored and elegant, outside the scene
at a proper aesthetic distance.
She, Algerian, darker than almonds,
almost part of the terrace shadows.

I do not recall the season.
It may have been that autumn was soft and new,
or that it was indeed still summer.
Ten years ago I would have said
August, and let it go,
a soft brush stroke to suggest fullness.
But now I am hardly certain where the sea ends
or the sky begins.
Only my signature seems exact: Henri
just below the flagstones on the terrace walk.

She said to me (the day in fact
the canvas was complete) ,
Henri, she said, everything is melting and imprecise.
And you have chosen to paint me,
your woman, without character.

Months later I was telling my friends:
Algerians have no humor.
But now the trespass of the years
demands consideration.
Could one undo a painting or a memory
he could say simply: There was a girl
reclining by an open window.

But instead I will do a landscape, my last,
in which each of the leaves will be a girl
reclining: inexact, characterless.
Each will represent a painting which commenced
quite simply, until line followed line and color
color, filling the canvas,
and something (one could say purity)
was lost in the process.
A single leaf fallen shall be taken to mean
this same Algerian girl
who died, I'm told, one year in August
of nothing very fatal.