Ronde I

*on Picasso’s lithograph (1961) 

They’re scribbles, they’re crayon crumbles, they’re a ring
a rosary, a round, a ronde, their legs are lifted and light
and the sketcher, the painter, the colorist, the famed artist
is also a bit of a monster and at times, a mean man
and yes, perhaps a genius man, taking three dimensions
and arranging in two then making these pictures
for conferences of peace, for the purpose of politics
employing celebrity to support the party with an agenda
of amity, after the horror of the world at war, he gifts
these figures, frolicking and free and close to the essence
of ecstasis—you can almost taste the catharsis—so much so
that the college girl tacks a print to her wall, so desperate
is she to be enlightened, to be lifted, to let her small song
join a chorus, to let the poem come to her, to let the dove
spread its wings and fill the god-shaped hole inside her
and since she has no lover, no bed-fellow, just books
and beloved solitude and the poster on the wall
she imagines a tattoo of a dove with an olive branch
and sees herself as a woman aslumber, her head
on her hands, dreaming, as the flow of the line
becomes an image of longing, she reaches
toward the dancers, there’s something in them
that knows the monster was both bird and stone
and that sketching is remedy for damp winters
and cold springs, for fights against fascists
and arguments with wives and that making art
is ever spinning round and round in a ronde
with the bird ever in the center, the metaphor
of not what we are, but what we seek, ready
ever ready, to revel, to be free, to take flight.