​Leaving the Tate
Fleur Adcock
 
Coming out with your clutch of postcards
in a Tate gallery bag and another clutch
of images packed into your head you pause
on the steps to look across the river
 
and there's a new one: light bright buildings,
a streak of brown water, and such a sky
you wonder who painted it - Constable? No:
too brilliant. Crome? No: too ecstatic -
 
a madly pure Pre-Raphaelite sky,
perhaps, sheer blue apart from the white plumes
rushing up it (today, that is,
April. Another day would be different
 
but it wouldn't matter. All skies work.)
Cut to the lower right for a detail:
seagulls pecking on mud, below
two office blocks and a Georgian terrace.
 
Now swing to the left, and take in plane-trees
bobbled with seeds, and that brick building,
and a red bus...Cut it off just there,
by the lamp-post. Leave the scaffolding in.
 
That's your next one. Curious how
these outdoor pictures didn't exist
before you'd looked at the indoor pictures,
the ones on the walls. But here they are now,
 
marching out of their panorama
and queuing up for the viewfinder
your eye's become. You can isolate them
by holding your optic muscles still.
 
You can zoom in on figure studies
(that boy with the rucksack), or still lives,
abstracts, townscapes. No one made them.
The light painted them. You're in charge
 
of the hanging committee. Put what space
you like around the ones you fix on,
and gloat. Art multiplies itself.
Art's whatever you choose to frame. 

​"When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel”
​Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 1509
(translated from the Italian by Gail Mazur)
 
I've already grown a goitre from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison).
My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's
pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!
My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's
all knotted from folding over itself.
I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.
Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts
are crazy, perfidious tripe:
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.
My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honour.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.

​The Painting
John Balaban
 
The stream runs clear to its stones;
the fish swim in sharp outline.
Girl, turn your face for me to draw.
Tomorrow, if we should drift apart,
I shall find you by this picture.

I dropped the façade, 
I let down my guard,
The veil was lifted it was 2012, 
I couldn't hide no longer, illusions no longer.

The truth, tell no lies
I've come out of my shell; I cried.
I wished to be born again,
It didn't matter in the end.

I could wipe away the fears,
And tear away those rotten years.
I filled that gaping hole,
And looked deep down in my soul.

I strip back the layers one by one,
And find the cause behind it.
The truth lies deep within my soul,
I've nothing to hide, I'm energised.

Revealing myself, tell the truth, no lies.
And now I stand before you,
This is the real me for infinity.

When I pass away, my soul is saved,
And carries on – another journey.

Liz Everett: Author of An Inner Light That Shines So Bright
ISBN 9781906 954055

The Oxford Times

A work of pastoral beauty.