To Max Jacob Reflected in the Eyes of a German Shepherd
When I hear anyone talk of culture, I reach for my revolver.
— Herman Goering
Apollinaire is already dead, and that macho pig Picasso
lives free in occupied Paris, protected by wealth and fame.
He’s audacious enough to walk the streets shoving prints
of Guernica under Nazi noses as he shouts:
“How could you do this, how could you do this!”
Word of his exploits reaches you even here
in the Drancy concentration camp barracks
through the mouths of other prisoners returning from work detail.
You sit on the top bunk fingering the yellow star
of David emblazoned on your armband.
For years it was always Picasso and Jacob,
Apollinaire and Jacob, or your surrealist cousins
printing demeaning slogans: “Read Reverdy. Don’t read Jacob.”
It was never Max and someone else,
never read Jacob for Jacob, never just art for art’s sake
without the self-aggrandizement, self-promotion.
Think back to the days of 1901. An unknown artist
from Spain sat in your apartment drinking red wine
as you read to him from a coffee-stained manuscript
pulled from a beat-up trunk, and heard him stammer
in pidgin French—why keep painting
when you’re already the best poet in France.
Think back to the birth of cubism.
You watched slashing brush strokes of color,
this tornado of movement from a corner chair
in the studio, writing off and on in a blue notebook
to perfect your own technique of showing both sides
of your face in profile simultaneously.
Think back as an apostate Jew to your vision of Jesus
on the walls of your apartment building,
the simple words he spoke that changed your life,
the way his body moved through
imperfections in the wallpaper,
his touch lifted the suffering from your brow.
Think back to your arrest by the Gestapo
in the monastery garden. You received
those jackbooted thugs with a Christ-like calm
as if the charges were merely a conversation among friends,
the trip in the black Mercedes an outing in the country.
Now Picasso roams the streets of Paris a free man
while you sit here on your sweat-stained mattress,
a pale, anonymous prophet of hope
blessing this audience of shaved heads
gathered before you eager to know everything about him.
As the stories spill from your lips, their faces,
carved out of grey, living marble, begin to brighten
and you slip in a joke about how he called you Sancho,
Sancho Panza, and tomorrow your Don Quixote will charge
through the mist to slay these fire breathing dragons.
.
To Miguel Hernández
Adios, brothers, comrades, friends,
let me take leave of the sun and of the fields!
— Miguel Hernández
March 28, 1942
Love can’t close your eyes.
Love, this bitter lemon sprinkled with sugar,
this hammer that drives the nails of your songs
Shepherd from Oriheulo,
you rot away in this Alicante prison,
thoughts crowned with rat dung,
the beloved Republic crushed
under Franco’s fascist jackboots,
while your wife and son eat bread,
suck the white blood of onions to survive.
Love can’t close your eyes.
Good Pablo saw you clearest,
your face like a potato freshly pulled from the earth.
How dark it grew in the sunlight and verdant fields
of your childhood, in the mud of pitch-battle
and the open doors of railcars transporting troops.
Now it’s a mirror that reflects
the shadowy movements of guards,
all teeth, fists and steel-toed boots,
special treatment reserved
for the Republican “commissar of culture,”
the soldier-poet who inspired from the trenches.
Love can’t close your eyes.
Lorca cautioned don’t be too impatient,
take your time, let everyone
see the generosity of your words and spirit.
What is time to you now
but the push of a broom, piles of dust
rising into mountains in dimly lit corridors,
stolen glances of sky and grass, uncaring doctors,
songs refined for weeks
inside you head before secretly
jotting them down on smuggled paper?
Your book grows, folded into the hems
of your wife’s skirt, your friend’s shoe-cushions,
like a tree of defiance raising
its leaves up from the darkness to bear fruit.
Love can’t close your eyes.
Many joke you built this prison
with your poems, board by board, brick by brick,
because they see a heart large as Spain,
a thirst still fighting for their future.
Yesterday, doctors drained a liter and a half
of pus from your tubercular lungs
after your wife’s visit when you scolded her
over your son: “You should have brought him,
you should have brought him.”
Now you slip into delirium, a shepherd again,
ear pressed against a goat udder
listening to milk fill the emptiness,
tasting its warm goodness, frothy with cream,
as the light the dead see floods your cell
with the beauty of leaving this world.
Love can’t close your eyes.
These fingers of love reaching down can’t close your eyes.
© Lee Rittenhouse
Lee Rittenhouse currently attends a local college majoring in computer science. During his spare time he enjoys writing poetry and short stories.
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