It's Still Life

A Poem Based on Henri Rousseau’s “Myself. Portrait Landscape” (from L’ile Saint Louis)

This woman’s name is Clémence.
She is Henri Rousseau’s lover.

You must, she tells, Rousseau,
be frontal, be primitive. Be the lion

in your jungle. Dress yourself in
best Sunday’s black, and permit

your feet to rise on pavements.
Pause semaphores on their lines,

and strike intricacy to detail.
Be yourself, Henri, a vedutisti.

These poems/prose are draft versions, written in participation of Miz Quickly’s prompts (image prompt) and Writers’ Digest (Poetic Asides) November poem-a-day challenge. The aim: to produce a chapbook for submission. ©Misky 2022 Shared with #amwriting on Twitter. Images are ©Misky, and created using AI-Midjourney.

Note: This image was generated by feeding Rousseau’s painting into the AI bot. It decided that Henri was a handsome woman. The image so intrigued me, that gender means nothing to AI, that I decided to use it.