Disconnected, by Kitty Jospé

The Weeping Woman, by Pablo Picasso (Spain), 1937.

Disconnected  

Picasso paints my insides 
with the outsides
of his weeping woman:
her violet, cobalt, tourmaline hair
sweeps to jigsaw colours
cutting deep.
White skewers, green clamps,
blue creases, purple, yellow
pleat her face into angles that say
don’t touch.

Such a lonely place.

I want to ask her if she is clenching
her handkerchief with her teeth
to express grief, or if those three green
fingers claw at it, as two yellow eyes
of fingernails look on with that jagged
white stovepipe of a thumb.

What rips at a mind like that?
What can repress it?

Energy weeps in colours chiseled
into shapes—they cut
the chords in the throat.


Kitty Jospé

Reprinted from Kitty Jospé's 2012 chapbook, Mosaicq, with permission from Finishing Line Press.

Kitty Jospé: "After retiring as French professor, I completed a low-residency MFA at Pacific University in 2009, and teach ekphrastic writing in summer to teens at our local literary center which is a short walk from  the University of Rochester museum, Memorial Art Gallery where I have been a docent since 1998.  I also give lectures on bringing poetry alive by careful study of art."