Jill Solnicki

The Model

Victorine Meurant speaking from Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe

Manet, it is cold! I’m naked: white, lumpy as bread dough, pale as the peach, that loaf of bread tumbled from the tipped picnic basket. I am le plat principal at this dejeuner.

They are clothed: ties, tight white collars, waistcoats brown and black - wrapped, like the trees are, in bark.

Carefully this morning I picked my blue poplin dress, straw hat and blue bow matching; now they lie puddled on the grass. You said: Take them off. Sit like this: your hand pressing my arm, arranging my legs, fingers, toes, so. You put me on the tablecloth.

And I must smile, you said, a La Jocande smile, my eyes holding yours: Eyes strain. Mouth stiffens. Toe twitches.

Behind me you have propped the other model, her bathing dress diaphanous. We are the eye’s bullseye. Even that bird, a bullfinch, hovers, looking.

The men are talking Haussmann, Bizet’s new opera and Delacroix’s death: they don’t know I know. Let them take off their vests and trousers, bare asses to this breeze’s bite, la bite like a little child hiding between wrinkled hills.

Manet, it is cold! Give me back my clothes! An ant crawls up my leg, mistaking me for mutton.

Darren Creighton

Darren Creighton

Darren Creighton

Darren Creighton