A painted face can hold still for centuries, but the man in Mary F. C. Pratt's poem won't. The title promises something fixed, a portrait of David Nichols by an unknown hand. What follows is a chase through Paris after a figure who keeps slipping out of the frame. The only moment the speaker seems to stand in front of the picture is the short, quiet stanza "I like the way you look at me / after all these years." Everything else is the portrait coming loose. The poem's central idea is that a likeness can't hold a person, but desire and imagination can set him moving again.
The opening is built from questions: "Did I meet your ghost," "did it drop / from your long fantomatique / fingers?" and "Was it your spectre I glimpsed?" The speaker never settles any of them, and the "maybe" that introduces the murmured compliments keeps everything on the edge of belief. Yet the details are vivid and physical. There is a "slim shadow brushing by," a rose landing "at my feet," a voice, and "your breath on my neck." Judging by the imagery, the speaker piles up sensations, from sight to touch, sound and then taste with the red wine, until the ghost feels almost solid. By the time she says "I want to run my hands through your hair, / trace the shape of your long nose," the haunting has become frankly romantic. Notice, too, that "long" belongs to both his fingers and his nose. Repeating it gives the portrait a recognisable outline, as if she were sketching him in words.
The language is playfully mixed. The ghost murmurs in "terrible French," a small joke that makes him human and a little ridiculous. But the speaker's own English drifts into French with *fantomatique*, *esprit*, *élégance* and *exubérance*. "Esprit" can mean both spirit and wit, so the one word covers a ghost and a clever talker. The last two French words are really English words wearing accents. It is as though she can't describe him without dressing her language to suit him, and the poem becomes a kind of tribute costume.
The sharpest turn comes with "I'm glad you died / in Paris." It's a startling line, but the reasoning is affectionate. Vermont, the poem says, "was too small / for your élégance, exubérance," even though he claimed to be a "real Yankee." The quotation marks around "real Yankee" and around "utterly impossible to raise a dance" suggest the speaker is quoting his own words, though the poem doesn't tell us where they come from. Dancing is the poem's image of his whole nature. She "cannot imagine / you in Vermont, in winter, not dancing," and the double negative nearly trips over its own feet. Even the ghost's gestures, such as waving an "immaculate handkerchief / from the Arc de Triomphe," read as a performance.
The form matches this restlessness. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only the loose rhythm of someone thinking aloud. Line breaks do small, clever work. "That rose that fell" is followed by a line that drops to "landed at my feet," and "fingers" is stretched over a line break so that it hangs, long and thin. The dashes and the ellipsis after "watching the moon . . ." let her drift, and the closing "oh, I don't know" lets her admit she can't quite explain why he fascinates her.
That final admission leads to the "Mona Lisa smile," the poem's best joke and its best insight. The Mona Lisa is the famous example of a portrait whose smile nobody can pin down, and the title tells us this portrait's artist is unknown. Since the painter has vanished, the speaker becomes the portraitist, completing the picture with a life, a city and a dance floor. The poem matters because it shows how an affectionate imagination can bring someone back to life, even someone only half-glimpsed in a frame.