mystery

the studio inside – rhythm

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All the while of la vie suspendue en l’air and la vie revenue à terre, I have been maintaining, more or less, my studio rhythm – piano, writing, documentation. So then something is going on in the studio inside, but to me, there is a kind of absence. An absence of expression. There is something about painting in particular that releases me into some kind of inner depth, while, mysteriously, materialising this depth into a visible form.

Is something preventing me from getting there?

Sometimes I just need to insist.

But as I write a recognise, yes, I’ve been doing immense works. Inner ones, in most cases, but also material ones of another sort – organising, unpacking, tending.

Perhaps now is time to try another intensity of insistence. Maybe I have a week before I leave for traveling to insist this into reality, to come home to water and colour, and to see what I find there…

revenue à terre

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As suspected I’ve come back down to earth, an event somewhat hilariously marked by the very material and grounding purchase of a new sofa. Although, excitingly, one with more space for a new season.

The change of seasons is always a kind of strange moment. An old prophesy calls the listener to ‘enlarge the place of your tent’, exhorting ‘lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes’. The image that always come to mind in this moment of a season shift is of the tent pegs disinterred, and the flaps of the tent flailing wildly in the air. Flailing, the perfect word for this kind of moment.

So now I’m not sure what the rhythm is. I’m aware that I have made progress in tending the studio inside, but I have not really inhabited it yet. I know this because I have not been painting, nor recently written a poem. Things are a bit flimsy.

There is no way to force this into a discovery, a moment, it’s a kind of waiting and that’s all there is to it. But in the meantime I take time to replenish all my stocks, feed my plants, shop for basics. I know that when the adventure arrives, I will be glad to be replenished.

hushed

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I was in two minds about whether to write this writing first, or the other one, which I will soon also write and post, but this came first and it felt like it deserved its place.

A hush really descended with the painting and poem that arrived called hush.

‘A hush descended’ – an evocative phrase to which I have never given a moment of serious attention, and all of a sudden the precision of the image is startling, as are the implicit poetics. ‘Descended from where’, I have literally never asked, despite encountering this reality many times.

From wherever it was previously, it descended. Perhaps it also was where it was previously, like a mist.

And it descended on to me, into me, a saturating silence, and had an effect, as to order all the atoms of my being in a peaceful direction, like the magnetic field on iron filings.

Mysteriously this is accompanied by a kind of paralysis of thought, but not an alarming one. Instead of making an effort to dig deep, uncover, investigate, tease out, they drift. A freedom, a mystifying intertwinement of the heights and the depth, and me.

And here I am in that hush and a kind of new beauty feels like it is unfolding.

deaths for you

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I have died a hundred deaths for you.
Since we met…
Since we kissed, that first time.

And you talked about our daughter
Perilously.

The cherry blossoms were not out
but sunlight glimmered cooly
over the spring air
over my red date shoes tucked under the café table.

You disappeared.
Something you would do again and again and again.

So I died that death then,
Cried the tears out in the middle of a business trip.
Discovered peace.
‘Extraordinary grace’ a voice declared,
And I believed it.

I was staying in your city.
You were seeing someone else, and yet
there was power, was there not, in that air?
You could not stay away; yet honour prevailed.

I died that death then,
cried the tears out in my new friend’s country house garden.
Her father made waffles with cloudberry jam.
How could such sweetness exist?
With pain?

I lived in your absence.
You never wrote or called.
You policed yourself so well.
One day you introduced me.
Possibly naive.

There was no death there.
I’d died beforehand,
in fire and wonder
of my own making.

And then you came to find me, again
we kissed, under the Red Moon sky,
in the midsummer night of a picnic,
a bracing swim,
tender conversations,
delight in your eyes.

In a blink you had vanished.
You were ‘afraid’.
You were ‘running away’.

You met someone else.

I died such a death,
the like of which I’d never seen before.
Wild trust, goodness and silence,
knowing, fury
Pain, fire, tears and painting
My dreams caught alight.

I have died a hundred deaths for you, yes
And I am more alive than I have ever been.

ode to the teapot

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Every morning you
wait, hear my
step
step
step
down the stairs
glimpse the dawn
of the dishwasher door
pulled open.

You, teapot, are
fully alert
lest, by an early morning
misstep
of crack or knock
you are relegated from
‘daily’ to ‘occasional’.

sitting proudly on
your dove blue
tray and blossom-patterned napkin
you listen
to the music of bubble
and steam, the faint
pliff of teabag
dropping
from a short height.

And welcome the
sharp, hot, dark stream
into your
shallow depths.

Oh teapot, how
content you are:
two or three minutes
pondering eternity
full of mystery
and mastery you
brew
nestled in your cosy.

And now, revealed
you relinquish yourself
to tilting, tipping,
teeming with
tea perfection.
Your sidekick
mug and you
a happy
mismatched couple.

A moment’s respite
white porcelain
teapot to consider
your antecedents
your factory provenance
and the luck that brought you
to me.

Another cup?

Teapot?

Note: this poem is from the ‘poetry retreat series’. We read Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to the Clothes’ trans. by W Merwin and were asked to write a poem about a familiar object in six minutes.