“cold winter sky—
where will this wandering beggar
grow old?”
— Issa


I. Stories

A ranch north of Spain,
his woman, their child... a dream
painted over, gone.
His... (unrequited)
...own tragedy for himself—
young death in Paris.
Quiet night at nine,
inside a café... gunshots—
being... nothingness...


II. Histories

A cold monochrome,
the winter hue of darkness:
umbra of despair.
Portraits of torment:
beggars, drunkards, prostitutes,
1901—
Lapis lazuli
thinned, turpentined—bleu de France—
ennui of sorrow.


III. Images

Melancholia
—the impotence of the will—
in Barcelona.
Barefoot on the street
corner, sitting on the ground,
he leaned on nothing.
A half-stringed guitar......
Germaine’s ******* distracted him..
he laid his revenge.


IV. Meanings

No can a beggar...
no steel strings a guitarist...
—a friend’s eulogy.
The cadaverous
curves of the bones torqued the flesh—
tedium of old age.
An allegory:
artists, poets, mendicants...
****** or broke oglers?


V. The Painting

His evocation:
the grave of Casagemas—
a guilt exorcised.
A mute’s discontent,
a blind man’s desolation,
an oil masterpiece!
An old guitarist,
blind, begging for an audience—
a blue Picasso.

there are worlds underneath words
swathed inward, swirling from
rondure of moon.

of all that i have loved,
you are the only one living

here within the lining of my skin,
or thinning dermis of turpentined walls,
same as the ponds have their
   curved silences, i have nothing -
a river bled of its source, living in wet verses.

what the turning of days might
bequeath you, as cunning as the mayday
of evening with its susurrus, is what
brims over diminutively, a glint of star.

i believe in the empire your love
spurned from all that is ruined,
drained of their excess. how i have loved
to trail you, across the crisscrossed roads
and receive such fullness no purer than mine:

all your sweetness that is for me,
the implacable honeysuckle and the dew
of mild beginning, i believe them
   all
breaking loose around me, perduring
   still, lorn and born only of visions
all yellow and filling up trees so as the assault
   of light spreading maps through the  sky,
      looking for its home.

Evening daubs of ox-blood, pipe dottle, rust.
The lakeshore and the bonfire and the trees stammer,
Pleasure mutters, in turpentined and transparent voices
Like many invisible things, intermittently believed:

The taste of my darling's knees, her summer dress,
Her strong, fresh, friendly kisses,
The smell of garden dirt and fireworks,
Magnesium flare and  copper flare on the matte sky:
Like doubt and the lovely end of doubt.

Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
pahutchinson@icloud.com