Followers

Friday 30 October 2009

ICICLES ROUND A TREE IN DUMFRIESSHIRE

by Ruth Padel

We're talking different kinds of vulnerability here.
These icicles aren't going to last for ever
Suspended in the ultra violet rays of a Dumfries sun.
But here they hang, a frozen whirligig of lightning,
And the famous American sculptor
Who scrambles the world with his tripod
For strangeness au naturel, got sunset to fill them.
It's not comfortable, a double helix of opalescent fire
*
Wrapping round you, swishing your bark
Down cotton you can't see,
On which a sculptor planned his icicles,
Working all day for that Mesopotamian magic
Of last light before the dark
In a suspended helter-skelter, lit
By almost horizontal rays
Making a mist-carousel from the House of Diamond,
*
A spiral of Pepsodent darkening to the shadowfrost
Of cedars at the Great Gate of Kiev.
Why it makes me think of opening the door to you
I can't imagine.No one could be less
Of an icicle.But there it is -
Having put me down in felt-tip
In the mystical appointment book,
You shoot that quick
*
Inquiry-glance, head tilted, when I open up,
Like coming in's another country,
A country you want but have to get used to, hot
From your bal masquй, making sure
That what you found before's
Still here: a spiral of touch and go,
Lightning licking a treeImagining itself
Aretha Franklin
*
Singing "You make me feel like a natural woman"
In basso profondo,
Firing the bark with its otherworld ice
The way you fire, lifting me
Off my own floor, legs furled
Round your trunk as that tree goes up
At an angle inside the lightning, roots in
The orange and silver of Dumfries.
*
Now I'm the lightning now you, you are,
As you pour yourself round me
Entirely.
No who's doing what and to who,
Just a tangle of spiral and tree.
You might wonder about sculptors who come all this way
To make a mad thing that won't last.
You know how it is: you spend a day, a whole life.
Then the light's gone, you walk away
*
To the Galloway Paradise Hotel. Pine-logs,
Cutlery, champagne -
OK, But the important thing was making it.
Hours, and you don't know how it'll be.
Then something like light
Arrives last moment, at speed reckoned
Only by horizons: completing, surprising
With its three hundred thousand
*
Kilometres per second. Still, even lightning has its moments of panic.
You don't get icicles catching the midwinter sun
In a perfect double helix in Dumfriesshire every day.
And can they be good for each other,
Lightning and tree? It'd make anyone,
Wouldn't it, afraid? That rowan would adore
To sleep and wake up in your arms
*
But's scared of getting burnt. And the lightning might ask, touching wood,
"What do you want of me, now we're in the same
Atomic chain?" What can the tree say?"
Being the centre of all that you are to yourself
-That'd be OK. Being my own body's fine
But it needs yours to stay that way.
"No one could live for ever in
*
A suspended gleam-on-the-edge,
As if sky might tear any minute.Or not for ever for long.Those icicles
Won't be surprise any more. The little snapped threads
Blew away. Glamour left that hill in Dumfries.
The sculptor went off with his black equipment.
Adzes, twine, leather gloves.
*
What's left is a photo of
A completely solitary sight
In a book anyone might open.
But whether our touch at the door gets forgotten
Or turned into other sights, light, form,
I hope you'll be truthful
To me. At least as truthful as lightning
,Skinning a tree.


THIS POEM WON THE 1996 National Poetry Prize

Sunday 25 October 2009

FANTASTIC MEETINGS AND NASTY ATTITUDE !

They were not really gentlemen












































Thursday 15 October 2009

THREE COOL GUYS IN VENICE


WH Auden, Cecil Day Lewis and Stephen Spender at the PEN conference in Venice, 1949.
Photograph: Hulton Getty

Sunday 11 October 2009

2010-CALENDAR



We are pleased to let you know that your artwork/photography has been accepted into the 2010 ArtWanted.com calendar! The date you will be featured on is: 11/18/2010

Saturday 3 October 2009

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER

Michael Goldberg ."SARDINES"
Why I Am Not a Painter
Frank O’Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well.
.................
for instance,Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it.
""Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

(1971)