Paris, Montmartre, 10/7/16
On the Rue Saint Eleuthere
I entered a gallery to ask the owner
the way to Picasso’s le Bateau Lavoir*,
the ‘laundry boat’ where Pablo scrubbed
artifice from art in 1907.
The man let fly directions with his hands,
gesticulating – go out, turn right,
then left, then over and down,
the only thing I almost understood.
From the saccharine grotto of his Gallic throat,
he uttered custard consonants, candied vowels,
which stuck to the roof of his mouth
before sashaying from his tongue
in a lush gush of symphonic sound.
I needed to know the meaning of his words
but savored instead the music of his voice
and nodded and said merci
as if I understood every word he said
and left his shop as lost as I had entered.
*Le Bateau-Lavoir – ‘the laundry boat’ was the humorous
name the poet and painter Max Jacob gave to Pablo Picasso’s
studio on Place Emile-Goudeau, Montmartre, Paris. The building
looked to Jacob like one of the laundry boats on the Seine, a 19th
century version of a laundromat. The original building burned down
in 1970 and was replaced by a new structure, now serving as studios
for new generations of artists. An interactive display marks the place
where Picasso painted his ground-breaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
in1907.