The Death of Picasso by Guy Davenport

Author:Guy Davenport
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504019613
Publisher: Open Road Media

WE OFTEN THINK OF LENIN AT THE CLOTHESPIN FACTORY

A city, not Paris. NOTCH, an old woman in a chair made from a barrel, beside a tall porcelain stove, a basket of potatoes in her lap. Kerchief, shawl, ample skirts, boots. POLDEN, a young soldier with lots of brown curly hair, Mongol cheekbones, green uniform with scarlet shoulder tabs.

NOTCH

There was once an Englishman named Vernon.

He was hunting hyenas near Carthage.

This was back in the nineteenth century.

He stumbled and fell into an abyss.

He was surprised, however, going down,

That it seemed indeed to have no bottom

And when one came, it was as if he’d dropped

Down into a great goosefeather mattress.

What’s more, he was coming back up again,

Rising on a steady and busy heave

Which by degrees brought him to the pit’s edge

And rolled him out onto terra firma.

He had fallen into a mass of bats

Which, disturbed from their slumber, had risen

All together out of the deep abyss

And brought the English hunter up with them.

POLDEN

Is that true?

NOTCH

Every beautiful word.

My husband Osip read it in a book.

He was a poet. They took him away.

I have all of his poems off by heart.

POLDEN

Are they published in a book?

NOTCH

No, never.

One of them is about the Old Cockroach

Seeing his face in the shine of his boots.

POLDEN

Did he write a poem about Lenin

Taking a walk in his automobile?

NOTCH

The square. Barracks of the Guard to the north.

Flagpole with flag. Blue sentries pacing there,

Scarlet facings with the odd number nine

In gold threadwork on their tunic collars.

They pace, cold, along the top of the wall,

Pace from the turrets to the tower gate

Where they meet, and about-face with a stomp,

And then tread back to the turrets again.

Below, along the blank wall, another

Pair of cold guards make the same cold movements.

POLDEN

The square, west. Friedrich Engels Institute.

Iron doors. Allegory of Labor.

Classical columns. Red bunting banners

Across the front on anniversaries.

Sometimes, a delegation with roses

From the People’s Republic of China.

The committee from Shqiperija

No longer visits, nor its football team.

The windows are lit at night twice a year

And then you can hear Rimsky-Korsakov.

NOTCH

But not Stravinsky or Francis Poulenc.

The square, south. The Ministry of Culture.

Bicyclists from Czechoslovakia.

Paintings by Aleksandr Deineka.

Sevastopol Dynamo Aquasports

Workers’ Summer Vacation Swimming Pool.

And Lenin Taking a Walk in His Car.

POLDEN

Peasant embroidery from Hungary.

Lenin teaching history to children.

NOTCH

The square, east. Ministry of Peace. The Dom.

Though it is understood that modern men

Do not light candles in Sankt Pavl’s Dom,

They still wear garlic against the Devil

And say nine novenas under their breath

When they have heard an owl hoot at night

Or by evil luck a bootlace has snapped

Or the mirror has fallen from the wall.

Women and children slip into the Dom

Before they have to go and wait in lines.

POLDEN

Old women do talk.

NOTCH

Puppies make doodoo.

Another tale, already. Herr Schriftbild,

A publisher, as soon as he had found

The apartment building specified in

Robert Walser a Swiss writer’s letter,

In a court off a square, both with children

And dogs, also found Walser’s door inside,

And, drawing the pull, heard a bell jangle

On a bouncing coil of wire deep within.

An interval, and the door was opened

By a butler in a swallowtail coat.

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