Powdery

Mary Noonan

They say she begged. They say she drank,

ran with men. They say she flogged every

last painting. What can I say of her,

Seurat’s ‘Young Woman Powdering Herself’?

That she was his younger companion, but

could never be his wife? That he kept her

a secret in a tiny room in Pigalle,

that she was pregnant with his child

at the time of the sitting? That within a year

her man and her child would both be dead

and the second child she was carrying would be

stillborn? She died an alcoholic pauper.

History knows nothing of her. And yet.

Madeleine Knobloch sits now in London’s

elegant Courtauld, in the frame that tells how

he saw her—a giantess stuffed into a doll’s

house, dwarfing dressing table and mirror,

vast rolling curves bursting from a tight bodice,

huge hair piled in a perilous blancmange.

Her magnificent, fat, alabaster arms.

Her gaze turned down, in wry impatience

at the ridiculous puff, as she stipples the room

with baby pink and blue pointillist dust.

Inspired by the painting ‘Young Woman Powdering Herself’ by Georges Seurat, in London’s Courtauld Gallery.

MARY NOONAN’S first collection, The Fado House (Dedalus, 2012) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and the Strong/Shine Award. Stone Girl (Dedalus, 2019), was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize. Dans un autre compartiment, Apic 2025, is a selection translated to French.