I'm resisting the temptation
(now you work at Tate Modern)
to visit you like one of the exhibits:
but I wonder how a century
of painters might have seen you.
Picasso flattens you
to an ironic eyebrow's hypotenuse:
Modigliani strings you out
like an inscrutable almond.
Chagall depicts you flying with a goat,
which is not how I envisage you:
Bacon's plastic surgery
leaves you simian, resentful.
(Wyndham Lewis sketched you,
but never completed the project
since you refused to sleep with him) .
De Kooning made you hideous,
a matriarchal monster
from a schizophrenic's nightmare:
Warhol silk-screened you in boredom.
It took Lucien Freud
to do you justice; nose
to a flower, dark eyes
depthless, Hebraic.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
Interesting that Freud does the Hebraic look in your poem and not Chagall.