Camille Alone

Camille Claudel to Rodin

While I weep, alone in my blacked-out room,
you are being fêted: your long-standing woman
at your side, toasting each other in Chablis.

I see her name scrawled over the plaster:
Rose, Rose … Each heavy vowel, a perfume
distilled by habit, sticks to your clothes

long after it has gone. Its luminous label
you cannot disown. Against my four walls
I have pinioned you, you claim, by trying

to force from your fingertips, if not
from your blood, the one affirmative
which would enable us to be together.

Behind chandelier-lit windows I crouch,
listening to shared jokes, to comments tossed
convivial around the table. In its polish

you might, for a second, see me mirrored
before the cutlery, silver-plated, crosses me out.
I hide here in the different light of our affinity –

which needs no ignition but flickers
secretly in your eyes, despite your words.
In my hands, I hold our intimate expressions

and touches, our useless passion injected
in what I sculpt. While, in mannered homage,
you kiss the cheeks of all the invited ladies,

I chip away at myself, paring skin down to bone,
dried rose petals and drunken laughs on my breath.
I order myself to be marble, flint, uncaring stone.

Unborn Children

‘Camille pétrit la matière pour enfanter ses créatures à elle.
Ce sera sa seule maternité.’
– Reine-Marie Paris, petite-nièce de Camille

Little Girl with Doves, oil on canvas, 1898
La Petite d’Islette, marble, 1895
La Petite Chatelaine ‘natte courbe’, bronze posthume, 1893
‘natte droite’, bronze posthume, 1895

Dancing in a ring around the limbo of my thought,
these fairy children, fading as I examine them,
plait my dreams into a skipping rope,

and play ‘pass the parcel’ with my sorrows,
layer by layer unwrapping the void, their gift.
I hear them sometimes chanting sweetly

their chosen names: Agnès, Emily, Hélène, Hortense,
as they rummage around my womb, all girls,
shaking coloured rattles of their own seeds.

One lies in my canvas still-born on a beach –
mourned by doves fanning her with white wings.
Another, whose head only has appeared,

lies breached in bronze. ‘Maman,’ chorus the rest.
‘Breathe us at least into the air.’ Which is what
I do. La petite d’Islette stares up at me

from her plinth, asking for what I cannot give.
Her sibling, La Petite Chatelaine, sits for me
day after day, hour by hour – plaits pinned up,

plaits down – showing me her longest faces
full of wide-eyed pain and anxiety for the only life
I can offer her: petrified forever in stone.

Dancing in a ring around the limbo of my thought,
the fairy children turn their backs on me.
Their skipping rhymes fade into elegies.

A Silent Valediction

(from the Pyrenées where Camille Claudel was taken by Rodin and another time by Paul, her brother, including to Lourdes, addressed to Rodin’s ghost)

Go, go into the morning, deaf to drums.
There are crows enough to send you off
and clouds to leave behind faint bruises.

Sweep through mists, shaving your face
on mountain edges. Know that – for you –
this woman would have slapped her life

against a wall to dry into kindling
and offered up her lengths of hair. Go –
regret not the valley’s floral show,

its rainbows. Laugh off intensities
in new clearings, borrowing the armour
of rocks usually her dice when heights

penetrate you with music. There’s work
for the asking beyond those mountains
which stand like noblemen, shirking contests,

backs turned on your courses. Go.
Leave her washing herds of wild horses
with songs that would only make you poor –

before her river grows into a sea
and she words you into tallstories.
Consider simply the ravines at your feet:

never a heart’s dichotomies. Go.
Chosen before the sun, you cannot backtrack.
Perish, with her, from reality.