light

There is something so light in this week in the studio. Perhaps it’s because of that, that it is only a week, even though I long for something more permanent.

I am accustomed to large-scale, intense, no-end-in-sight-for-months-or-years projects. I have deeply integrated the virtue of difficulty, its capacity to draw out a wildness, a unique depth of self that is rare and to be treasured in our how-long-can-I-distract-your-attention-from-anything-important world.

And then here I am, tumbling into this week, breathless and weary from my other work (in business, since you ask) and I find myself in something so sweet and beautiful and light. I somehow feel no pressure. I have elegantly disembarked from my responsibilities. I had no time to weight the week with intentions. I am existing, pure and free.

It’s such a pleasure and so unusual as a grown woman to encounter such an interlude. And it has, I must admit, taken some diligence and hope to protect it.

But I wander about, peaceful, playing, and I can feel a luminous uncanny that I have not sensed for a long time, magnifying within me.

wild the sea; the spray, gold

storm, the wildness is coming
restless, I scent the rain
distant, but nearing
me, adrift, chop

currents crush me to
each other, press into my
skin, insistent
you are mine, Mine
I don’t belong to myself

forces pull on limbs
a vast rose crimson,
pulsing in the drench

clatter, rain advancing from
another shore, nearer still,
nearer, sound the drums of
torrents, clash against clash
whip, foam, soak, slap,
gasp, yet not a drowning
yet

monstrous pitterpat
hail, rain!
splatter
tumult a poor shelter,
lift me up, hide me
may I nestle in your ferocity

dip into the pinkish hue
silence a moment
down
returning,

surface
all is rose dawn
wild sea; rain-spray, gold

Note: a second poem in a series painted to Einaudi’s Divenire, played by myself after a long absence. This life size abstract water colour is painted in Rose Madder and Permanent Rose (Windsor and Newton Professional watercolour) splattered with Rembrandt Light Gold (Series III watercolour)

the year of the poem, a pondering

The looping that I have noticed is in particular taking me back to the year two thousand and sixteen, ‘the year of poem‘ (strangely I did not feel like writing digits, I am aware it looks a little odd). With some fanfare I christened this year with a title of such vast aplomb it appears that I sank under the weight of it.

The ‘year of the poem’ plummeted from its giddying heights to a swift confrontation with reality, as I quickly realised. The ‘poetry diary‘ stayed buried in a box, poems remained unwritten, even the ‘editing poetry course‘ became an ordinary memory with startling rapidity.

No more ‘year of the poem’ musings were mused.

But now looking back, the year of the poem was speedily despatched, not because the poem element was too small, but because it was too big.

Somehow, a pre-existing poetic dimension took hold of my whole entire life.

And, of course, being frail, not really realising, consumed by other things, practicalities, transitions, this elemental condition was not fully grasped.

Dizzying though it may sound, preposterous though it feels to write, what happened to me in the year two thousand and sixteen is that my weary, care-worn ways of being were shed, like an age of reason skin, and I leaned into trust, to relinquishing control and holding on to faith as a human experiment. And slowly but surely, the very substance of my being mutated into wonder.

What does it mean?

I’m still not entirely sure.

rim

I am teetering on the rim of hell.
Can you feel it too?
A certain kind of danger.
A lure.
A vat of swirling hate; all the discouragements of my life
kept
Waiting, rotting, writhing.
Clamouring.
L’appel du vide.

I am teetering and it will take only the most
infinitessimal inner shift to fall,
I gasp.
Precarious in my very breathing, existing fraught with
concentration.

It’s calling to me now, I hear you,
‘Oh poor you’, ‘no change’, ‘it always fails’, ‘what a
pitiful and lonely unreality; you continue to delude yourself’.
Perhaps you are what is most true?

Hell, I tell myself.
I WILL NOT GO IN THERE.
I will not keep company with dread, defeat and deep
disillusion.

My story will be different.
Only I can make it from another thread.
Those voices lie.

I am teetering on the rim of hell.
And I will not fall in there.
I steady myself.

still

I am still here, it seems.

Maybe you have noticed the dates petering out, as if I was on my last legs, a disappearing, but no.

Somehow the me that is me, is an insistence, more, perhaps than is convenient to myself.

She arrives and takes charge and all the other mes acquiesce.

It is a long time since I started writing here. I am older. She is a mood, and often that mood is weighed down under Responsibilities.

I wriggled out of the skin of my old existence. I left everything and moved, for this self.

I had artistic space. And then I didn’t. Then I did, then not.

Everything takes longer.

I am in a struggle for the existence of a self almost no-one cares about except me.

Except I think you know the feeling.

I have a week in a studio. A week. It seems short.

I have decided to fill it with eternity; love and fire.

Watch me.