Donald Platt

XV. Album of Figure Studies
—From Male Venus Rising

I imagine Sargent opening
the black cloth and cardboard covers of his album of figure studies,
                        frayed brown leather binding,

watch him thumb again through the charcoal sketches of nude male models.
                        Over his shoulder, I see
how Nicola’s hooded eyes, his long Roman nose, keep reappearing

                        among the models’ half-averted
faces. Many of the drawings are of Nicola d’Inverno,
                        Nicholas of Winter,

his beautiful body changing over twenty-six years. The last
                       folio in the album
shows a young, lithe, lightly muscled man with his legs drawn up

                        under him, right wrist bent
and posed on his hip so the palm faces up. His other arm,
                        perfectly perpendicular

to his torso and V-angled at the elbow, rests flat on an invisible
                        table of air.
Though Sargent made this collotype in 1921,

                        three years after
Nicola stopped working for him, the young man has Nicola’s
                       thick eyebrows, soft shadow

of his mustache. Is it Sargent’s memory of Nicola
                        at nineteen, dream boy
with a satyr’s insatiable body? Fawn flesh still untouched,

                        he is Nicola
di Primavera, Nicholas in spring. The drawing is an old
                        abandoned man’s

dream of first love. Here is also Nicola d’Estate, his boxer’s
                        lean, well-toned body
reclining on an unmade bed. He’s pushing himself up

                        with his right forearm, right leg
dangling over the bed’s edge, as if he’s only now awakened,
                        after making love three times,

from a hot afternoon’s sweaty nap. His long cock rests
                        on his white right thigh.
His left leg is raised on two silk pillows. He’s Sargent’s summer

                        lover. Here’s also
Nicola d’Autumno, a man of forty leaning forward
                        on his left leg so only

the ball of his right foot touches the ground. He still has a boxer’s
                        broad pectorals and thighs,
but his slim waist has thickened. Both arms are raised over his head

                        to form a Y,
a boxer’s gesture to the yelling crowd after he’s knocked
                        the other man out cold.

These charcoal sketches are Sargent’s love poem to Nicola,
                        to the quarter century
they lived together. He collected the drawings he’d kept always

                        hidden in his studio’s cupboards
and glued them to the album’s pages so he would remember
                        Nicola. They’re no different,

except in quality, from the snapshots of Nora I’ve taken
                        over twenty years
and put into our photo albums. I too marvel when

                        I open them and see
Nora young again—in her black bathing suit with the blue diagonal
                        stripe running over

her full right breast, lean abdomen, to her left hip—fallen
                        asleep on a yellow and orange
lawn chair on the end of a dock. She’s unfolded the chair flat

                        to make a bed surrounded
on three sides by lake water. Two blue flip-flops stand
                        like empty footprints

next to a crumpled, wet, brown and white towel. They are what’s left
                        of those long summer days
I can’t remember except for Nora lying there, white sunhat

                        slipped to one side
so I see each delicate ridge of her left ear’s cartilage. One gold hoop
                        hangs from her earlobe

and catches the sunlight. She wears her long thick hair in two wet braids.
                        The swell of hip and breast
is a speedboat’s wake rolling, undulating across the calm

                        lake to break against
a seawall. The water laps and laughs. Schools of minnows
                        dart and flash

through the barred shadows under the dock. The whole bright day
                        comes back, contained
in the single angle of a snapshot. I dangle my feet over the edge

                        and the minnows swim up
to nibble them. Those small mouths make thirty simultaneous kisses.
                        They tickle until I can

hold still no longer. I flinch. They scatter. They are our twenty
                        summers, autumns,
winters, springs together. Here is Nora, eight months pregnant

                        with Amy, our second daughter
who just turned twelve. Nora’s standing in baggy blue tunic and matching
                        shorts on our front porch

in Salt Lake City, three houses ago. She wears owl-eye sunglasses
                        which reflect me taking
her picture and the two small squares of grass enclosed by concrete

                        that are our front yard.
Everything’s doubled and distorted in those dark convex mirrors—
                        my head like a tadpole’s,

bigger than my body. Why are there always two of me?
                        In the next moment
Nora will lift her blue tunic to show Valerie, our older daughter,

                        her belly swollen into
a taut-skinned balloon, big as a globe of the world. Her navel is
                        the balloon’s tied end.

In the photo Nora holds two red swollen tomatoes with green stems,
                        which she’s just picked
from the garden, up to her breasts engorged beneath her blue tunic

                        and grins. One
of the tomatoes is so ripe its skin has split and spills
                        juice and seeds.

Nora’s nipples are already leaking colostrum. In the next
                        snapshot, Valerie
stands in the garden. She has wormed her way into an empty

                        tomato cage’s cylinder
and twines her arms and legs around the rusted wire. She wants
                        to grow up fast, leaf out,

and be a green tomato ripening in the hot sun.
                        Every summer
Sargent and Nicola would visit Violet, Sargent’s

                        sister, and her six children
“on the Continent.” Nicola would remember, “One of my self-appointed
                        tasks was to carry them

about on my back. They are now quite grown up, of course, all but
                        one of them.
Rosemary, a sweetly beautiful girl, was killed by a bomb in one

                        of the air raids
on France.” Beyond the bomb, Rose-Marie Ormond still stands
                        at seventeen in Sargent’s

sketch, The Cashmere Shawl, watercolor and pencil on paper.
                        She’s walking a garden path
in early spring. Only daffodils are flowering. The stucco wall

                        behind her is scribbled
with shadows. She wears a billowing white dress, has wrapped the shawl
                        tight around her waist

to show off her slimness, the fullness of her hips. It is a study
                        in cream, brown, beige, and taupe.
Head bound with a mauve scarf, she is swathed in her long dress

                        like a mummy. Hands
hidden. Only her face visible. Bronze hair, blue eyes gazing at something
                        beyond the picture.

What is that clotted turquoise blotch to the left of her head? A shadow,
                        the painter’s too impetuous
brushstroke? Her dress blows in harsh March wind. Soon she will walk on.

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Donald Platt’s seventh book of poetry, One Illuminated Letter of Being, was published by Red Mountain Press in 2020. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Nation, Poetry, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Tin House, Southern Review and Paris Review as well as in The Best American Poetry 2000, 2006 and 2015. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1996 and 2011) and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches in Purdue University’s MFA Program.