Thinking on Kandinsky and Gabrielle Münster

My nickname startles in this bohemian quarter of Munich
surrounded by orthodox Jews and immigrants from the East.
In the inns of Rialto two painters
drink gin with beer and two redheaded whores.
The night is clear in the hideaways where the moon suggests itself.
What music was Kandinsky listening to
drunk in his studio?: Was it Moskva or Kubanskaya vodka
that unfastened his madness?
In Cairo Nina wakes up from a nightmare
about a lonely boy playing in the lonely snow.
Vassily longs for the delineated breasts
of Gabrielle there in his rickety old bed
for his drunken paintbrush,
her thighs taut like a delicate Valkyrie.
She cries because Vassily cries in Moscow for her:
A damsel dressed in pink / ducks in flight /
a baroness’ portrait
What does it matter! The piano and the cello are still in the same house.
I lose sight of him and surprise him in Neully sur Seine
with Paul Klee (drinking a Pernod next to the river).
The chiaroscuros and the grays capture the terrible souls
and Moholy-Nagy immobilizes their expressions
/ with his virtuous camera / when he paints a triangle
that seems to be motionless.
The paintbrush softens the time and clarity of shades
and Vassily is obsessive because he is a melancholy genius
before whom God’ mouth is silent in night’s total darkness.



(Translated by Deborah Moore)