Blue Nude Poem by Elizabeth Spires

It is not true
what they say about the body:
that it must be loved, that it cannot
sleep through its nights alone
without injury.

Look at me. Look
at the way the artist lies
about his loneliness, painting a room
where walls, floor, and ceiling
converge on a door too small

for me to leave or enter.
Leaving my face featureless as snow,
my body bruised like the pears
he buys only to paint.
They should have been eaten weeks ago.

Swollen and isolate, they sit
on a bone-white plate, their shadows
distortions of their true shape,
ellipses of blue and darker
blue the eye falls into.

I know
how the snow fell for days
outside his studio, how he painted
in his coat and gloves,
rising each morning

to break the ice
in the washbowl and light
the stove, the heart of the flame
blue against his chest.
The heart, he thinks, the heart

is blue and solitary.
It knows what it knows.
And so he paints a room
with one of everything:
one bed with one pillow,

one window overlooking
shadowed figures walking
two by two, one book whose pages
turn as days do, each page only
a part of the larger story.