Please note that the poems and essays on this site are copyright and may not be reproduced without the author's permission.


Thursday 30 July 2009

The Blue Dress


.


File:Schiele - Stehendes Mädchen mit blauem Kleid und grünen Strümpfen - 1913.jpg





I close my eyes

and see you at the age of 30

beyond the mist of affect

in your blue dress

so slim and Viennese

in the Sharons’ picture gallery

at Tissa’s party

a stormy night in 1974

with the ocean roaring

against the breakwater

I find you there with

all my projections

withdrawn at last

and what appears is

you in your blue dress

in this bewildering recurrent

intensified mind garden

I call creation

because you created it for me






File:Schiele - Mädchen mit blauem Polster - 1913.jpg






Standing girl with blue dress and green stockings: Egon Schiele, 1913
Girl with blue pillow: Egon Schiele, 1913

11 comments:

poetowen said...

Unforgettable--

Every so often this poem works itself up to the front part of my mind, like a favorite song--I search the shelves for my copy of Easter Sunday and read it one more time.

Mariana Soffer said...

I love the drawings, specially the lower one, it reminds me of this little man called toulous lautrec.

My favourite part of the poem is:
intensified mind garden
I call creation
because you created it for me

Your mind is a gardent that was created for yourself. How beautifull that someone does that, it is because he cares so much for you.

TC said...

Owen,

Sweet of you to say so. It's another of my undiscovered minsterpieces from the Church of Private Revelation period. It's not even easy to find in Easter Sunday since the index page number is wrong. (Hidden and esoteric to the end....) Since Easter Sunday it has been stripped of 15 lines. And then resurrected by way of a new ending. All that went on over many years, a sort of intermittent harrowing-and-revival. But as that harrowing process is more or less in the spirit of Egon Schiele, I thought, okay. For confirmation of the revival part, I hereby rely on the rock upon which my new temporary Church of the Order of Lazarus is founded, my friend you.

Mariana,

Many thanks. I've always thought your mind must be a garden. Mine is badly overgrown with weeds and has many fallow sectors. The credit for creation here goes not to a he but to a she. One wouldn't have had it any other way. (The rumours of a He-Creator have I think been greatly exaggerated.)

human being said...

wow... this is celestial!

and all those details make this heavenly feeling so palpable... so concrete...
a reverse movement is experienced here (comparing to the previous poem) and how masterfully it is done...

Elmo St. Rose said...

blue angel
blue angle
reverb

cerulean blue
azure too

it's not over
baby blue
says to knife blue

Elmo St. Rose said...

A better ending

it's not over you
baby blue
says to knife blue.

"Knife blue" is a color seen at
sunset at Big Sur and in the mountains of New Mexico.

TC said...

HB,

Many thanks. Yes, the details feel palpable to me even now. I find longterm memories of certain moments appear to survive forever, whereas memories of where I put something down five minutes ago are gone--also forever. Perhaps it's best that way, I like the old memories better anyway.

Elmo,

a bit of blue for you

human being said...

perhaps you were present wholeheartedly in those moments...

TC said...

...Yes, that may be the explanation. Fewer of those distracting half-life conditionals and sticky Ifs...

Anonymous said...

This kind of images from the past are blessings for the heart. They are the treasures we keep jealously and our shelter when we feel "blue".

TC said...

This particular memory remains vivid to me after almost forty years--a night of storms and heavy surf, in an old house by the breakwater, the northern Pacific roaring at the door, an almost timeless moment... sometimes "history" is cancelled out and we are fortunate enough to hang suspended in such moments, as if for eternity.