Jane Ann Miller
SEPTEMBER 9,1901, MALROME
Goodbye, au revoir,
Toulouse-Lautrec-
The old estate will have no heir,
Montmartre, no habitue,
Its whores, no debonair roue
To sketch them frizzing hennaed hair
On solitary afternoons,
To call them by their own real names
And make them famous with a line,
A litho, or the lithe design
That you yourself now lacked
Or lost somewhere at age fourteen.
The cost of love cousin-cousine
That left you barely jockey-size
To straddle chairs in cabarets
And watch the late-night carousel
With laughing, heavy-lidded eyes,
Watch dancers, clowns flash legs,
Flash silks-
Sleek horses at the hippodrome,
Thick painted ponies
Polychromed in yellow,
Red and absinthe green .
It's round and round,
Small men astride,
The music plays, the midgets ride.
They trace an outline of this scene,
This sporting life
That spun you, dazed,
Onto the lawn at Malrome
To die at leisure and at home ,
To rot with painful, lordly ease,
