OLYMPIA LEAVES A NOTE FOR ME

A MESSAGE FROM OLYMPIA
(Museé d'Orsay, Paris)

You’ll find me presently, in Room Number Fourteen.

If you want to love me, forget the other one 

who stares out of the canvas far too brazenly.

I, Olympia, would like to see you again

and wonder why you have ignored me for so long.

Don’t spend too much time with Caillebotte’s floor-planers

or Bouguereau’s nymphs and satyrs, or the sweet-toothed

dancers at Renoir’s Moulin. I too have a sweet tooth

for galettes. Beware the tricksters who approach you

in the street and pretend to pick a gold ring off the ground.

Gold rings, like me, are treasures not easily come by.

Look at the bunch of flowers my maid is giving me:

it’s from a statesman, he’s quite close to Bonaparte.

But, powerful men apart, I’m very partial 

to poets and artists. Manet was the making of me,

and Baudelaire was bawdy with me once or twice.

In the Orangerie, Paul Klee is thinking of death

and as for Monet’s wall-to-wall lily pads, they

are fine in their way, if it’s lily pads you want.

When a young woman hands you a five-Euro note,

don’t treat her the same as those peddlers of false gold:

you’ll have dropped it searching pockets for your métro ticket.

At Place de la Concorde, pause to remember me

in the sweep of the river passing under bridges,

bearing boat-trippers, its shimmer in the summer heat.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll, 2010