Cover Story, by Deborah Gorlin

Picassiette House, by Raymond Isidore (France) before 1964. Zairon, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

​Cover Story
 
Raymond Isidore (1900-1964) La Maison Picassiette, in Chartres
 
He sought on impulse fragments 
of crockery and glass, to make mosaics
 
pressed upon household objects, 
his wife's sewing machine, the headboard of their bed,
 
chair legs, even coffee grinder and lamp, 
poignant in their native isolation. 
 
When he brushed surfaces with adhesives, 
worked with simple tools, spoon,
 
pen knife, fork, embedded coloured 
shards of porcelain, earthenware, faience,
 
into wood, metal, stone, he felt 
the world safely settle into itself again, 
 
under his fingertips, a big wide nest, 
sky and earth, moon and stars, 
 
return entirely to earth, intact, 
sturdy ground to steady him, 
 
Raymond Isadore, the cemetery sweeper 
in Chartres who, bored by the doldrum 
 
broom had some other reason for 
being, bigger purpose. God told him so, 
 
a mission. Orphaned stashes of broken plates, 
piled porcelain cups, abandoned in the dump, 
 
implored him to make use of them, he obeyed, 
spread his butter, every surface a bread,
 
and studded it with shards, a highway of tesserae.
As he set each fragment into the sticky mastic, 
 
figure into ground of every appropriate object, 
he fostered home, sweet continuous home,
 
a skin, a poultice, an exorcism, a vision,
a convulsion, heal the wounds of the world. 
 
Any wonder his wife and kids complained, 
the neighbors called him picassiette,
 
plate stealer, but he knew his future 
glory, dreamed when he'd be pressed 
 
into the grout of God, a petal 
in the mosaic rose, Jesus hugging him 
 
close to his chest, where, among the other 
good souls, he could finally take his eternal 
 
rest, lie down on his back, upon the only object
that alive he couldn't cover over --
 
where he and his wife had slept, that stark but soft 
bed, now made purely of a porcelain heaven. 

Deborah Gorlin
 
Deborah Gorlin is the author of two previous books of poems, Bodily Course, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997, and Life of the Garment, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize.  Her new book of poems, Open Fire, Bauhan, was published in Spring, 2023. Recent poems have been published in Plume; On the Seawall; The Ekphrastic Review; Mass Poetry: the Hard Work of Hope; The Common; Rumors, Secrets & Lies; Swwim; and Yetzirah. Her lyric essay, “Jack of All Trades” was a finalist in Calyx magazine’s 2022 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing.  Emerita co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review.