Late Painters: Matisse
After Henri Matisse’s “La Gerbe”

When his hands could no longer hold a brush,
Matisse turned to paper and scissors. “painting”
with cold metal carving heavy gouache
like a knife through butter, shearing shallow
reliefs. The liberation of image from paper.
And my left hand, too, betrays me, mysteriously
cramping, twisting like a snail in a shell. No relief
but to pry my fingers back into the shape
of a normal hand. And so the dance goes on.
Confined to chair or bed, Matisse’s “seconde vie”
lasted fourteen years, as he learned to use white
as a negative space, working paper like a sculptor
cutting through stone. This is where I’d like
to be working, reducing the buzzing complicated
world to its pure essence, ridding myself of
arabesques and complexities, summing up
the dance of my life in simple forms.

—Barbara Crooker

Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and author of nine books; Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, is the latest. Her awards include the Best Book of Poetry 2018 from Poetry by the Sea, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships. Her work appears in a variety of anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.