Picasso Poetics, Days Of Desire Poem by Desmond Kon

I.

According to Can Grande della Scala
the first level of wellspring meaning:

On 9 January 1959, Pablo Picasso wrote a poem
at La Californie, his villa in Cannes. He called it Hunk of Skin —
an infrahistoria with a sort of gazpacho coldness. Just across his lap
lay his mink ranch and its menagerie, the greylag and magpie geese.

And across from that his Malaga, knifing along a blue arête
overlooking a gorge. Today, the synagogue is flagged like a maypole.
That Cantonese restaurant serves soft peanuts in tiny woks.
In the town square, Cyndi Lauper is singing La Vie En Rose.


II.

According to Can Grande della Scala
the second level of overlords, meaning:

Her voice in a dog-violet quiver. All the other details are petered out;
the splashes a Gestapo red, chunky taxi-yellow letters receding
one folio at a time. There, someone has patented Cezanne’s handwriting
as a bitterwort font; it curls mandarin language, like cake icing.

Forget about encountering some porcupine fanning its quills
or cheese shoes with their pinky toes and stinky soles
or any merry-go-lover to string bluebells, anklets on both wrists
or tablecloths with crabs of flint, and leftover quail.


III.

According to Can Grande della Scala
the third level of meaning, an apestail:

Hang-gliding between those two mountains is an explorer
no one can see; nor those seaside cabanas eastside, even from up here.
It’s just as well no one believes in fortune cookies in Malaga
this hilltop hideaway, and its backwoods flyman charm;

we’re milder-mannered leaving our tourist goodbyes
on paper napkins, threadbare notes on necessity
on what it means, the sufficiency, the rich traditions
the good-life living, the highlands and great white hoping.


IV.

According to Can Grande della Scala
the fourth level of meaning anagogic:

The head servant decided to be matronal after all;
and served the red mullet in Nymphenburg porcelain.
He’s real, pathfinder to the Pyrenees, these discreet evenings
quiet silverware always shining, always neat alinéa lined up.

It must be an old melodeon love tinwhistling
through the flower market — the hydrangea, the freesia, the larking
emotions unwrapping, lavender spray in disarray like guillemets;
hunting season nears, game-bird jubilee before

the Gabirol thanks,
giving hands to toy heaven?





Author's Note:

An earlier version of this poem appeared in Xconnect, a literary journal published in association with the University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House.

In his book, Birds With Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press,1978) , Beryl Rowland attributes some of the general religious symbolisms associated with the lark to a case of “false etymology”, when “some medieval writers, such as Alexander Neckam, thought that the Latin name for lark, alauda, derived from laus, meaning praise”. While Shakespeare and Milton saw larks singing hymns at the gates of heaven, Blake viewed it as a “mighty angel”, Wordsworth celebrated it as the “ethereal minstrel”, and Coleridge described its voice like that of an angel. “They did not realize, ” Rowland writes, “that alauda was of Celtic origin from al, meaning high or great, and aud, meaning song”. Rowland cites the 15th century treatise, Pilgrimage of the Soul, which describes larks as birds “that in Latyn has the name of praysyng and of worshepyng, and be called ‘alaude’… and purely they prayse God with hire mery song”. Still, Rowland looks to the Romantics, where “the lark became a symbol for various human experiences”: “The lark in Blake’s ‘Milton’ inhabited a landscape of private mythology and was the embodiment of inspiration. Los was poetry and the lark was Los’s messenger. Similarly, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley saw the skylark as the symbol of spiritual transcendence and of creativity in its highest form. In his famous poem, Shelley disclaimed the notion that the skylark was a bird: it was the soul, fully winged, in its totality and perfection as described in Plato’s Phaedrus; it was also the symbol of the poet and an apostrophe to the power of poetry itself. Implicit in the poem is the contrast between the joy of the spirit of the ideal poet embodied in the bird and the unhappiness of the earthly poet despairing of man’s regeneration.”

Solomon Ibn Gabirol remains celebrated as the Jewish philosopher who wrote Arabic poetry during the High Middle Ages, as mentioned by Joseph Dan in his book, The Heart and the Fountain (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,2002) . Known for writing that transcends the three monotheistic religions, Gabirol “used the ancient Hebrew Sefer Yezira (‘The Book of Creation’) as a primary source, ” as Dan says, “paraphrasing its enigmatic phrases and integrating them into his own worldview”. Gabirol was a native of Malaga.