They must have thought he’d gone insane,
the old man too sick to paint, lying in his bed,
a turban perched upon his head

and colored papers all about.
Matisse wrote a friend I’ll need a white cane,
gone blind from cutting into color this way,

the bright spirals and chits falling off his scissors.
He made a book of jazzed-up clowns and kings
floating lagoons and tropical plants,

its acrobats and rearing horses, too big to hold
in my hands, land smiling across my lap.
But deep beneath the circus paint a cry, a frown:

a man who swallows a sword, his pain
starred in his eye, a magician winding up to throw
a knife at a woman, his lavender assistant splayed

against the wall. He’s coiled like a snake,
hot pink on blue and beige, caught in the moment
before letting go. And all around, leaves and ferns

are raining down—one boxed in white
where her heart should be, its shape an obvious target
for his knife’s velocity, her arms thrown up and still.

Think of Manet and the firing squad
in the Fifth of May, Goya in the Disasters of War,
think of the years Matisse survived: his wife living apart

and the smoke still cooling on all the battles of his life.