***
Picasso’s hair was square,
Your hair is air,
They know what ‘to fly’ means,
They move with the slowness of sleep.
They are zeppelins drawn
By Da Vinci’s hand.
In your wet hair I land!
Their radiance,
Maddened by moonlight,
Reminds me of Saint Petersburg
During the white nights,
When the gramophone sounds
Of Rachmaninoff
Fill the art nouveaux rooms:
Walls dressed in English wallpaper
With flamboyant flowers,
A fireplace –
Where coals, covered with ash,
Die.
I’m lying dressed
In a fur coat
On the bed of the tzar size,
Strands of gold rain lines
Scatter over my face,
Nothing can hide their beauty,
Not intended even for the immodest gaze
Of stars
In my roof-window.
Your wet hair take me to the moist March streets
Of Paris,
To the spring in Russia
When the ice melts
And the earth starts to live.
Your wet hair play the melody of grass and trees
On a stormy evening in Greece.
Your wet hair is birds circling
On noiseless wings,
They mold from liquid to solid rain.
Their fluid origin affects
The endless forms they take,
And makes handshaping them
My night art.
Your wet hair has the strength
Of all the electricity civilization used
Since the invention of a light bulb –
Trillions of hour-kilowatts!
Picture a city the size
Of San Francisco, Tokio and Shanghai,
Cairo, Moscow, Mumbai – together!
That’s the electric power of light
Your hair
Emanate!
Your wet hair make me think of things I miss:
My mother, friends, my piano
That I never learned to play,
My fairy-tale recordings
On vinyl.
Your wet hair is like woozy sensation
You get
With a first cigarette
When you are young…
They are the accidental beauty
Of a handwritten letter
In the age of Facebook.
Your wet hair… your wet hair… your wet hair…
Is so fragile and yet so strong
To keep me staring mysteriously
Out to the square drops of rain
‘ A la Picasso’.
