La Vie En Bleu

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come

from all over the place: from the sky, from the

earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing

space, from a spider's web."

- Pablo Picasso, Conversation (1935), an interview with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, quoted in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 271.

My Father's Blues

It happens every time I come across

The blue painting with the blind man

Hunched over and wrapped around his guitar.

*

I see my father hunched over in despair

Having lost his ability to speak

And share his thoughts.

*

His guitar, still strung and in-tune

Leans into the corner next to his bed -

Longing to be strummed by the warm

Hands of a gentle man.

Inspiration for the poem "La Vie En Bleu"

Carles Antoni Cosme Damià Casagemas i Coll was a Spanish painter and poet. He is known for his friendship with Pablo Picasso, who painted several portraits of Casagemas. They traveled around Spain and eventually to Paris, where they lived together in a vacant studio. (Wikipedia)

La Vie En Bleu

The blue man can't stare back at me,

Yet I feel piercing eyes tearing into

My heart weeping silently in the blue.

*

My father reaches out and places my

Hand in his - blue warm paint washes

Over me from my own salty pools closed

To the visions of the voiceless and the blind.

*

Picasso's Old Guitarist pulls me into

Melancholy tunes from icy blue mountains

And silver rivers born from winter's snow caps.

*

Not expecting an answer I ask:

"Picasso, why does the blue pull so hard

at my heartstrings?"

*

In the silence, the painting speaks back to me:

"I wept blue into my paints when I learned

Of Casagemas' death."

*

Anguish and despair portrayed on every canvas

The sick, crippled, and hungry transformed:

Elongated figures endowed with haunting

Beauty and supernatural grace.

*

Grief has left us troubled, old friend.

We are fated with suffering and tragedy.

*

Can we escape our fate?

Is there a utopian state of grace?

*

Though blind, inner sight reveals all.

Overwhelmed by misery and mourning -

The universal constancy of pain

*

Casagemas and my father lost

Plunging us into total grief

Turning red and yellow light

To blue melancholy, sadness, and despair.

*

Our forgotten people mise en abyme

Famished spectors of misery -

"La Vie" - an allegory of the cycle

Of existence painted in blue -

One day to give way to something new.