Eve Brings the Head of Charlotte Corday to the Museum to View The Death of Marat

Were you proud of this work?
Alone, would you have stayed, lit candles
to better see the water darken?

For the parallel I cannot speak
with conviction. I felt then as I felt
the slap after I was executed
but before I was quite dead:
sensation of neither shame nor triumph,
just a chill, then blood rising to paint my face.

And this one—did he cry out
for someone? His mother?

I wasn’t listening. Or, I was listening—
hard.
So much blood there should have been
sound in its welling.

To make such a quick end
you must have practiced—
in the courtyard’s sucking mud, perhaps,
after the first spring rain fills the troughs.

Before that day I never gripped a knife
but to eat, stabbed only convent linen
with my needle.
Such sacred hearts I made.

And your own?

I would rather be useful than mourned.

(A little higher, if you please.)

This is not at all how he looked. How ugly he was,
like a radish pulled too soon,
fit to be blanched at best.

Surely you expected some apotheosis.

Do they keep my likeness
in a palace, too? I asked
for a painter. Gave him notes.

He should have waited
to sketch the tumbril, the unrepentant red
of the assassin’s blouse—

and the rain, the sudden summer
pelting rain
could have washed me clean
instead freed runnels

of some other Brutus’s blood

to pool between my corset and my heart

—but your eyes startled him
almost into sympathy. Humble
gray, so respectable a shade.

For a murderess.
Too cool for a martyr’s gaze.

And no flame for you
to endure.

No, just the slice then the executioner’s
grip in my hair heartless yet
more real to me
than the memory of my mother
braiding, making perfect
symmetry in silence.
Over our bodies the ice
branched
into wings on the window.