Jean and Suzanne, by Lorette C. Luzajic

The Prison of My Thoughts, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada). Contemporary.

Jean and Suzanne

He can’t draw, 

and she’s 
afraid of 
everything.
 
(Her lovers know the rules: 
no guns 
in the bedroom.)

He says his paintings 
are jazz. He cries
over Billie 
Holiday’s 
unmarked grave.)


Once upon a time, 
a man 
who can be counted among 
the great loves of your life
told you about Jean, and 
you grumbled something
about overrated outcasts.
(You were still too young to know 
anything worth knowing 
in those days.)



This same man once
kissed you because 
Tom Jones was singing 
on a jukebox at the 
Winchester Arms Hotel
(now a Starbucks.)
Kissed you like you never thought he’d kiss you
and never kissed you again,
no,
not like that,
and you never wanted him to,
because it might take away
something from that night.



It was this man, too,
who said your work reminded him 
of Cy Twombly’s.
There was no Google then; 
it was not until
later
that you read how only Cy
of any painters
was allowed
to make pencil scribbles
on his paintings.
Ah, well, you did not know.
And all your work has pencil scribblings,
and it is too late to stop doing
exactly what you are going to do, 
to stop doing
exactly what you want.
(And that is what this man who kissed you
with an audience of irate bikers
who did not like Tom Jones
at the Winchester Hotel
saw about you and loved.)

You do not recall the complete details
of all those afternoons 
spent swaddled in the arms
of red wine.

But, 
it is also true 
that love 
is brutal and lonely;
it means spouses, choices,
death, children

and 
other
disappointments.


Now you are almost forty.
You still can’t draw, 
but can’t has never stopped you, 
not from anything but success, that is.
You fill those canvases,
you fill those pages,
the terrible law of averages
means obscurity for the great and for the small.
You accept that.
Who will read your books?
You will still write them for those 
few, for this man, 
the one who was always up
for another long story, long after 
all the others 
had gone on.

And now 
he too 
has gone on,

and  that is how 
it goes-
those 
who loved you 
have turned
to ghosts. 


And how do you live a life
when all the living has gone out of it,
when everything you knew
has turned to dust?
You also miss the one 
you married by mistake,
the one who changed you,
the one who told you
to go and meet  your fate.
The one who gave you new eyes,
and then gave you coins 
for his.
Now here you stand:
the whole earth is his grave.



But you live.
That is what you do,
it is what you can’t help,
this hunger to create,
which you will do even if
no one is left to see it,
or no one wants to.
It is why you are here.


But once upon a time, 
oh the parties, 
oh, you would not believe
oh, you would not believe  
the music. 
You could see in voodoo. 
You were still up to see
the sunrise flooding the world with light.
And you were still up to see it go down.
And oh, the magic, 
of those potions and those powders.
They caused the great and
whole empires to crumble,
so you forgive yourself.
It was so beautiful at first
to be so cosmic.
Oh, the music, it was too much.
How it could move over the beach and
out across the water,
oh, how the stars 
would dance.



And after,
way after, 
after you had moved on,
the way you always will,
to wrench every poem 
out of every ordinary moment,
to paint, to live alone, working furiously
you showed some work.



They were
big white paintings.
They were about clean,



they showed your emptiness
to anyone who cared to look
and few did



but some did,
the man did, 
he was there
he was always there, 
even when he wasn’t.
There in your aloneness 
at the edge of
the end of
the world,
there he stood
looking at those big white paintings,
those paintings about emptiness and clean,
looking into your devastation and sorrow
hand on his chin
searching them
his eyes far away
then he turned
and said,

This is your best work yet, baby
you know that don’t you?
As if I was a real artist or something.

Lorette C. Luzajic

This poem first appeared in the author's book of ekphrastic poetry, Aspartame.

Lorette C. Luzajic is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and the author of four collections of poetry. She is a visual artist showing regularly in her home town Toronto, and has recently exhibited in Tunisia and Mexico. Visit her at www. mixedupmedia.ca.

From Jean Michel Basquiat's notebooks. (USA, 1980s.)