​Why He Did Not Paint What He Saw


That day in the museum
I was unable to tell my niece
how Matisse reduced the world
to interplays of illumination and pitch.
Portrayed how darkness under 
a table has a weight of its own,
which has loomed forever,
which moves toward us
and will someday claim us, 

as any infant knows in its vast terror 
as it screams in the shadowed crib
for the brilliance a mother cracks open
when she comes to the nursery door.

That sudden flood of light 
is equal to the one Matisse swirled
around the bowl of fruit that he made 
hover amidst incandescence and coal.
 
Matisse's fruit is as rounded 
as the breast that a nursing mother offers
the howling mouth of her infant
at the moment when fulfillment comes.