You see the painting,
Olympia, by Edouard Manet.
Pretty brazen, this chick.
Any attempt would require, well, Olympian efforts of seduction.
But is she more brazen than the the Poet?
Manet’s Olympia
By Margaret Atwood
She reclines, more or less,
Try that posture, it’s hardly languor.
Her right arm sharp angles.
With her left she conceals her ambush.
Shoes but not stockings,
how sinister. the flower
behind her ear is naturally
not real, of a piece
with the sofa’s drapery.
The windows (if any) are shut.
This is indoor sin.
Above the head of the (clothed) maid
is an invisible voice balloon: Slut.
But. Consider the body,
unfragile, defiant, the pale nipples
staring you right in the bull’s eye.
Consider also the black ribbon
around the neck. What’s under it?
A fine red threadline, where the head
was taken off and glued back on.
The body’s on offer,
but the neck’s as afar as it goes.
This is no morsel.
Put clothes on her and you’d have a schoolteacher,
the kind with the brittle whiphand.
There’s someone else in this room.
You, Monsieur Voyeur.
As for that object of yours
she’s seen those before, and better.
I, the head, am the only subject
of this picture.
You, Sir, are furniture.
Get stuffed.
Have I had this Olympia?
No matter, Margaret has it in for me.
I, my maleness, my male gaze are the malefactor’s here.
But methinks the room a mite crowded.
The servant, this cold-gazed dame, myself,
Who else?
The painter, of course. No scorn for him. Hell,
If it wasn’t for him, she wouldn’t have a poem.
None for Olympia, attended by her maid.
And to think, in this tiny room, with its bed,
Its easel,
Its artist,
His paints,
And a voyeur, no less,
We still have room, packed as we are, cheek by jowl,
For Madame La Poete.
Come in, come in, my dear.
The more the merrier.
Just don’t let on, my dear
That you were there, too.
