painting

Joan Miro by Paul Éluard

Sun-prey prisoner of my head,
rub out the hill, rub out the forest.
The sky is more beautiful than ever.
Grape-dragonflies
give it form so precise
that I disperse with a wave.

Clouds of the first day,
insensible clouds, that nothing authorised,
their grain burns
in the straw-fire of my eyes.

In the end, to cover itself in dawn
the day must be as pure as the night

Three Poems after Amelia Humber

Goss

After Amelia Humber

The tongue of the cosmos mouth
drags its mist along the pond –
many eyes of the coral
or barnacle prayers impact
with a soft white thud and cloud
on the world’s hill – and deeper
the deep ink behind things seeps.

I stand in the softened copse
of the shore – rain drenched but warm
unnamed white flowers blow here
amongst the heather – their heads
bob and jump in the quantum
breeze – where I once might have thought
I now dwell with the land’s power

*

Coopers

After Amelia Humber

Strobe lights over the shallows.
The marsh flows, hardly, but still
it flows here with the thin grass
so thin and black, it’s like hair.
A magnesium surface
and water, as the flock-spheres
make their debris way through air.
In the mist there are things now
things you never wanted but
were offered for your viewing –
a procession of faceless
saints, a small black sheep hovers
legless, only seen in dark,
an entirely different sky

*

Point

After Amelia Humber

With a faint humming, negate
the sky as an unreached space
(a space we can hardly grasp)
and split open a vault – to
the dark above the grave pit
ridden with frost and snowlit
pourings – through this chasm tear
see the world as it could be
bare of all ground, all solids
floating in nothingness – then
between abyss and abyss
as it sees you – iris
vaster even than god’s eye
and the pupil that screams ‘live’

*

Painting credit to https://www.ameliahumber.com/

Dame Autumn Hath a Mournful Face

After John Atkinson Grimshaw

You don’t yet know the fae.
Its church arches and bones.
It overlays on the trees
which become a seething delta

How the pools reflect black
to spite what they note above them
never sure of the horizon
your gaze wanders, unceasing

thin and twisting flowers
the green, and floating flakes of gold leaf
the faintly blue of the night
then, which slips alongside – her;

uncreasing the folds between worlds –
her insect wing-shimmer. And bright
shines one thing nakedness can do
mournfully at you, with a crown of flowers

The fae curves just like this.
It worships with patient light
that which you may worship.
If she wants you, touch the canvas

V.2

In the repurposed church, music
recessed into the walls, and dark
times ahead. Seems to be the thing
which repeats on me like music

But day after day I have fun
I say to myself have fun, I
say over and over again
that emphasis is in the wrong

place, like the climbing site I saw
straight through. With my pen and paint set
in stone, I recorded in paint
the view from the chevin. Over

coming the attitude required
reading – and the trees became marks
vectors in an ancient game of
tropes and niches and clades and more

quietly as the paint’s surface tension
belongs in the world of calmness.
How should I say this? Unsettled
times when I am meditating

through use of representation.
Where neuronal activity
Is both the cure and the problem
child in the way that clouds descend

V.1

Four woodpigeons pace the garden
of my adolescent dreamscape –
when tree houses hung suspended
above dark woods. And faceless things

were different back then they belong
among us, deep in my headspace
one pigeon is puffing itself
greater than the others, it thinks

one would suppose, and then settles
the argument. Flown to the woods
I hear the uniquely quiet
sound of paintbrush on old jam jar

where Beatrix Potter’s stand in
with warm and wiry red hair sits
on the fence and marks pigments out
of this world, and makes paintings

hang in my childhood, in halls with
abandon. a picture of me
and Van Gogh. I am young and
wiry. I paint now because these

are the deep horsehairs that gallop
out when I sit on the beach rock.
I will build my mind the gates of
time will not prevail against me