In the Louvre With Xavier
(The Shattered Mirror of Avignon)
Five women stand, yet all are broke.
Against a curtain of ochre, blue, and white,
Picasso breaks the world with a savage stroke,
Reordering flesh into jagged, painted night.
Two sit in masks of African heat,
With eyes of daggers, vacant and intense,
Their limbs disjointed, monstrous, yet complete,
A fierce assault on beauty’s old defense.
See the prostitute on the left—archaic, frozen—
A nod to Spain, a shadow of the past,
While her sisters, on the right, remain chosen
To bear the mask, a spell of anger cast.
No sensuous reclining, no soft embrace,
But angularity that confronts the gaze,
Stealing the viewer’s quiet, private space,
And holding him within this broken maze.
They do not smile; they threaten from the canvas,
An “ugly” genius, a scandal wrought in 1907.
Rejecting perspective, a violent impetus,
Turning a brothel into a fragmented heaven.
It is the birth of the machine, the modern, cold,
A mirror shattering the Renaissance view,
Where beauty is not worshipped, but controlled,
And all that was known is made anew.
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