BROWSE Columns
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After Jose Hernandez Diaz
A woman in “Salvador Dalí for President” shirt draws blue butterflies with her eyelashes on two cotton pads. She borrowed the shirt from her friend Jose, a surrealist poet. The least materialistic of all arts, poetry weaves magic out of thin air. A woman in “Salvador Dalí for President” shirt looks at her unembellished reflection in the mirror. Two stanzas of blue butterflies fall upon the hardness of floor travertine.
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Momentarily the woman will strip the “Salvador Dali for President” shirt and walk into the shower. She will do it in a way she walks into her poems: with wounds exposed. Earlier today she saw another woman, topless, on the Dunas de Maspalomas. There were many men, too: miniature palm tree trunks dangling in the December wind. Two nudist plages sit between the dunes, it turned out. If you are put off by nakedness, it is your problem. When the woman comes out of the shower, she wipes the steam off the mirror.
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At sunrise the following morning, the golden ribbon of the sky stretches over the bouquet tops of resort trees. The woman in “Salvador Dali for President” shirt takes a seat on the balcony overlooking the lagoon and scrolls through L'Amour la Poésie by Paul Éluard on her phone. With Éluard’s wife, the woman in “Salvador Dalí for President” shirt shared the first name — until the poet changed it to Gala. Two days after their wedding, Eluard left for war. The year when L'Amour la Poésie was published, Gala was already Señora Dalí. This is the magic of life, the black and the white. Minutes escaping at the clapping of wings. Every castle is a sand-clock.
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Dalí painted Gala hundreds of times. A sleeping nude floating in an aquatic scene. A side view with two lamb pieces on the shoulder. A realistic portrait from behind in which Gala is looking at her own body depicted again in the distance. The woman is “Salvador Dalí for President” shirt zooms into this picture. The body in the distance is deconstructed, but also temple-like. It sits on the dune, of which it is made.
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Now the woman in “Salvador Dalí for President” shirt stretches on the sunbed by the hotel pool. She is wearing a blue bikini, but most of it is covered by the shirt fabric. The winter sun gives her sand-coloured skin gentle but persistent kisses, which are simultaneously enriching and destructive. This is how the sun kisses everyone: the man engrossed in a book two chairs over and his spouse with a flower tattoo instead of a nipple. The least materialistic of all arts, poetry weaves magic out of thin air. Can the woman in “Salvador Dalí for President” shirt learn to love her body in the L'Amour la Poésie kind of way? Can she weave magic into it, with all of its wounds? When she finishes this sentence, the “Salvador Dalí for President” shirt resembles a collapsed flag. Two stanzas of blue butterflies fall upon the hardness of floor travertine.
Lena Zycinsky is a poet and artist whose work appeared in the New York Times, Poetry Archive, Consequence among other places. Author of numerous books and shows abroad, she holds a BA in English Literature and is currently a low-residency MFA student at NYU in Paris. Born in Belarus, Lena lived in the USA and Greece, and now resides in London.
