Picasso
A vignette
I have finally gotten around to starting the book I bought at the little cramped store in Taos from the man who wouldn’t stop talking after I complimented his hat.
You whispered, That’s what you get for talking to people and I smiled
The summer we met you rued the books you gave away, as I appraised your collection that first Saturday in your living room: at last, a man who reads.
The book is about Picasso’s counteroffensive against Franco on a canvas almost too large to mount — an elegy, a mural for his smoldering homeland, forced as he was to watch its destruction from afar
When I saw the book, I told you it had been on my list for years. That morning over greasy ski town eggs you asked me if I wanted to look around for bookstores nearby, in the moment after I had thought the same thing
I thought coincidences like this meant to you what they did to me
Inside the book I found three bookmarks for three independent bookstores; I said we could use them as a map for our next trip — let the hidden bookmarks in the books we buy tell us where to go
Franco had the Germans bomb Guernica for him then told his own men it was the Communists. He ordered his men to guard the rot and rubble he had just created.
In wars we write the stories of good and evil and pass them down like crystal and battered quilts
Hoping the moral is self-evident and preventative, we repeat ourselves
We guard our own parched land.
My books stack up. I keep buying more, used, of course. I rewrite our history as each day I forget you more, and forget to remember you
I liked our shared pages, the days we overlapped.
Picasso kept taking lovers and fathering children but mostly he painted. An exiled prince, he died one border from his home, survived by the man who wanted him dead
When people ask about you, I tell them about your absence
and the enormous emptiness I no longer have where you once were.
