Standing girl with blue dress and green stockings: Egon Schiele, Vienna, 1913
I close my eyes
and see you at the age of thirty
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
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withdrawn at last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
Girl with blue pillow: Egon Schiele, Vienna, 1913
Standing female nude in a blue robe: Egon Schiele, Vienna, 1913
Houses on the Moldau, Krumau: Egon Schiele, 1910
13 comments:
Beautiful . . . Both the red and the blue.
Thanks very much, Nin. They're both my favourite colour!
Oh man, what a lovely poem, so lyrically concise and yet richly evocative. And the complimentary Schieles seem pleasant, even sweet. Not adjectives that usually come to mind with Schiele. Even delightful, which applies for the poem and the juxtaposed artwork. Altogether brilliant, as the Irish say.
Michael,
The Irish -- my favourite clan!
They're so... Viennese!
The play of creativity in this poem, for the retrograde academic like me, one who has likely studied more aesthetics than he has created anything particularly aesthetic, is a wonder. I like that it builds dreamily to that waking jolt: "in this bewildering recurrent / intensified mind garden / I call creation / because you created it for me". Before progressing to the poem's final line, I clung for a moment to its penultimate neighbor, "I call creation" -- each word seeming to require the other, so tightly wound, they, as to be nearly indistinguishable. Well, indistinguishable, that is, until "you," that lady in blue, is recalled, reminding us that walled gardens of our mind, those of the isolate creator-voyeur, are rarely (if ever) our own.
One never knows what or how another will create for us. Muses, not unlike love, sometimes like lust, are so accidental.
Tom,
A dream vision "in the Sharon's picture gallery . . . ocean roaring against the breakwater" (!) -- oh my, that girl in the blue dress. . . .
11.28
light coming into sky above still black
plane of ridge, bird chirping on branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel
meanwhile by means of, form
organized by “return”
scene of figures, as actors
in these seemed, from
orange of low sun in cloud above ridge,
shadowed green pine on tip of sandspit
"Space we can recover; time, never."
Napoleon Bonaparte
Beautiful poem. It makes me a little sad though. The passage of time always does. We are as unique and fleeting as clouds. And when we are gone no one will ever see our exact likeness in that time and place ever again.
Few words could fit better here than:
"We are as unique and fleeting as clouds. And when we are gone no one will ever see our exact likeness in that time and place ever again."
Makes me sad, too, Ray. That vast grand cañon, the past, peopled with all these ghosts...
Steve, this
“return”
scene of figures, as actors
of course occupies a stage with which you are probably familiar. That old beach-house. Though then again -- over all these years, and stormy winter nights, across the yawning interim of time, perhaps the waves have broken down that stone breakwater, along with all the other remembered monuments?
(The off-stage action never stops, though the "play" itself may be long over.)
Brad,
"One never knows what or how another will create for us. Muses, not unlike love, sometimes like lust, are so accidental."
How terribly, heartbreakingly apt.
What
a creation--memory
blue, your muse
and you.
Vassilis,
You've led me over here.
Both these poems and the accompanying paintings very evocative.
Muse
She'll always say
'An inch tighter.'
While getting
measured
for a new stitch
Tom,
Yes, the offstage action never stops, nor is the play over (yet) -- that seawall is still there, more or less as you remember it, "that old beach-house" too, but now owned (I'm told) by the guy who started Zinga (which made Farmville, whatever that is), one of his many "second homes" no doubt (O Temps, O Mors). . . .
You can't ever make it tight enough to suit the Muse.
I've always figured people who think they need second homes must have been unhappy in the first.
Zinga! My favourite idiot word for the day!
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