Barbara Duffey: “Bazille’s Studio”
BAZILLE’S STUDIO
—after Frédéric Bazille, 1869-70
A painting we can’t see
endures discussion by three
male figures; another two
converse across the stairs.
At least four naked women
deck the violet walls.
Over the whole floats
a nude like Renoir’s Diana
(her kill at her feet, her bow
in hand), as some dirigible
god.
Renoir’s Diana looks
at the dead deer, but
the woman in the x-ray
stares at us from underneath
the stair-climber’s right leg.
One presumes Diana’s deer
was also conned by camouflage,
its bloodied neck extended
to the bottom-right of the canvas,
where the stove and the signature go.
That stovepipe curves like a bow.
The stove glows like Diana’s skin.
Barbara Duffey is a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in poetry and the author of two poetry collections, most recently Simple Machines (The Word Works, 2016), which won the 2015 Washington Prize. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. Duffey is an associate professor of English at Dakota Wesleyan University.