Yadwigha, On A Red Couch, Among Lillies

Yadwigha, the literalists once wondered how you

Came to be lying on this baroque couch

Upholstered in red velvet, under the eye

Of uncaged tigers and a tropical moon,

Set in intricate wilderness of green

Heart-shaped leaves, like catalpa leaves, and lillies

Of monstrous size, like no well-bred lilies

It seems teh consistent critics wanted you

To choose between your world of jungle green

And the fashionable monde of the red couch

With its prim bric-à-brac, without a moon

To turn you luminous, without the eye

Of tigers to be stilled by your dark eye

And body whiter than its frill of lilies:

They'd have had yellow silk screening the moon,

Leaves and lilies flattened to paper behind you

Or, at most, to a mille-fleurs tapestry. But the couch

Stood stubborn in it's jungle: red against green,

Red against fifty variants of green,

The couch glared out at the prosaic eye.

So Rousseau, to explain why the red couch

Persisted in the picture with the lilies,

Tigers, snakes, and the snakecharmer and you,

And birds of paradise, and the round moon,

Described how you fell dreaming at full of moon

On a red velvet couch within your green-

Tessellared boudoir. Hearing flutes, you

Dreamed yourself away in the moon's eye

To a beryl jungle, and dreamed that bright moon-lilies

Nodded their petaled heads around your couch.

And that, Rousseau told the critics, was why the couch

Accompanied you. So they nodded at the couch with the moon

And the snakecharmer's song and the gigantic lilies,

Marvelingly numbered the many shades of green.

But to a friend, in private, Rousseau confessed his eye

So possessed by the glowing red of the couch which you,

Yadwigha, pose on, that he put you on the couch

To feed his eye with red, such red! under the moon,

In the midst of all that green and those great lilies!