Chana Bloch
 

Chana Bloch’s Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems will be published by Autumn House in 2015. The author of four earlier books of poems, Bloch is co-translator of the Song of Songs and poets Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch. She is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she directed the Creative Writing Program. www.chanabloch.com.

Beaux Arts                                                            

 

They knew something about pleasure, too,                      

those painters—how well they understood             

it may be compounded                            

of the simplest elements, the merest trace                     

of water or light.                                

       

Courbet's L'Origine du monde, for instance.       

The bedclothes are thrust aside

and a woman's fleshy thighs                                        

sprawl across the canvas toward you

as you approach.                          

 

Courbet studies his nude with the diligence                

of a lover. And lets you see    

in the reddish fur

at the body's threshold

a hint of wet 

 

like the dab of white in the iris                            

that lights the eye.

 

 

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