Lost Picasso

William Doreski

 

Returning to my Cambridge flat
after thirty years I find the rooms
twice as large, rippling with flowers,
the bedroom now a balcony
overlooking an open court
with formal garden far below

where naked couples frolic.
Beyond the court the hundred windows
of a competing facade return
my gaze.   I sit on the bed
and wonder where my Picasso went,
a print I bought on Tremont Street

in the South End of Boston where stone
stoops groan as tenants sit and chat
and the blank agony of boarded
fire-swept townhouses for decades
has rehearsed for me the failure
of flesh I've never learned to love.

I left the Picasso here when
I moved to Arlington and claimed
the first garden plot of my life.
Four years there, the windy light
on the railroad tough as dentures,
my long, long Sunday walks along

the tracks so indeterminate
I hardly knew when they ended.
The couple currently renting
this flat cavorts with the others
far below.   They gave me their keys,
being trusting nymphs and satyrs,

and I've searched the big rooms and found
a Mike Mazur painting and Warhol
seriograph I'd also left,
but no Picasso.   I brace myself
on the balcony rail, lean over,
and watch the couples dance in the shrubs,

their bodies gleaming.   Years ago
I knew their names, but I've traveled
so far and left so few clues like
Crusoe returned to England .   Forget
that Picasso, nearly worthless,
take my Mazur and Warhol and leave

these big unfamiliar rooms to close
like oysters and crush the trim
lecherous young inhabitants
till they weep with the same sort of pain
I've learned marks the cycle of worlds
beginning all over again.