 Seated Woman, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1930 The Lady in the Painting Malignity is absent here. Raw materials breathe a mellow insanity, but never fear. On the contrary: they follow laconically the colours pure, minding only atmospheric luxated lines in their demure abdication of generic intention. Overall, the mood, intimate, conveys impressions (emerging slowly from the dewed nebulae of mild accretions by glazing craftily obtained) purposely reminding gazers of visions from their youth unstained. All you see, as sharp as razors-- because she knows the way by which duller hues can contrasts render besotting—is the beams that glitch easy comfort whilst the splendour you're wrapped in shakes you. Isn't she little, standing in the middle, between that old and twisted tree-- pondering facets of a riddle recalling memories she fled eagerly to dive in waters obscure and filled with all the red urges nurtured by our daughters whenever they awoke—and this cheerful, tall and bright old house where none was supposed to grieve, where bliss hardly leaves the place for elsewhere? Remains of previous times don't leave merely tracks and stains on canvas. Observe the seasons: they reprieve innocents alike and envious, mellifluous scoundrels from the woes lingering after the embrasement and the embracement, and the throes life, through the coming amazement, is bringing with itself. Our child is maintaining fragile balance. Nonplussing whirls of paint beguiled erring wanderers in the silence-- perhaps not silence, rather still bits of life, remembered morsels anonymously heaped until otherwise blown—that ensorcells deflated egos, humble wights. By and by, the hours of winter elapse together with the nights, bartering the snow winds splinter, long beating background hills, for chills yellow dawns of springs forgotten perchance will brighten. Warmth soon fills beechy meadowlands, nook-shotten ectopic groves in blossom where ruthless birds of prey in hiding unite and mate whilst they can bear onwards as the day goes sliding. Curvaceous fields in ranges stretch westwards, blond vales with wheat pregnant herefrom extending… Not a wretch near the heiress standing regnant, necrosis-free, will ever taste heart-scald, loss and doubt. Redeeming whoever, in a frenzied haste, crosses her domain in dreaming, orectic moods, she soothes the pangs undeterred explorers bring to realities in which time hangs evermore heavier. They cling to bewildered landscapes, not so still pictured lives and vanities. Their yokes and their shackles tamed their will, lest these cold realities, their belated lives one day be left empty, desolate, and void of bizarre, accepted slight—bereft, destitute of filth, destroyed. Of obliterating sprees that seize Adamites, in shame rejecting both roots and branches, leaving lees plainly chaste, and sap deflecting eloping mania to the wild, netherwards—there's naught worth saying. In times appointed, their defiled innocence will stop decaying. Long afternoons of summer pass absently away. Our daughter's lability's a looking-glass mingling fires and lustral waters in glebous magma and new forms on the surface of her being. Malignancy, through her, transforms rust to light. As wisdom's freeing her lips, her wordly gates unsealed, now for all of us unveils the cherished way out, the path concealed, weft beneath the warp, and scales the unvarnished paint won't hide. She sings old, unheeded songs: an oral ecbolic that delivers things rampant with an anger aural. Parhelic halos open skies blankly void until old creatures lasciviously crawl in, all eyes, yearning power, control of nature's effulging source which flows from here. Beasts of prey, they hunt and feed on debilitated hopes and sheer blood—for her apostles bleed on apocalyptic, cryptic glyphs on the fabric kythed. The picture's parerga will collapse. The gifts bound to them—so many strictures, narcotically induced—will fade. Eerie comes the night's new winter. In a day's year, time runs fast, made in the dreamland of a painter. All falls apart. She stands, her brush lowered in midair, uncertain. “Maybe I should this painting crush? Leave it hid behind a curtain? Obliterate it? Have it burnt?” Icy voices from her artwork remind her of the lesson learnt: Marvel not at your own brushwork… Romain P.-A. Delpeuch This poem first appeared in the New English Review. Author's note: "The Lady in the Painting" is the last chapter of a (so far unpublished) prosimetric novella, whose main character eventually becomes a painter. The poem is about her and one of her works. The painting it refers to is therefore completely imaginary. Romain P.-A. Delpeuch was born and bred in southwest France, where he still lives. His poetry and short fiction have appeared, or are forthcoming, in New English Review and Terror House Magazine.
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November 2023
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