Poem
The girl on a rug with a cat
is an entirely decorative proposition.
She curls, the cat curls, even the rug
displays some notion of this movement
with its diverting curlicues.
Life, too, is making a start inside the girl
although she cannot know this right now.
Some contract with another is being made,
even as we speak, on the rug with the cat beside her.< ...
I lie on the couch
like a beaten dog
as Philip Mould advances
on his latest art forensics
and there are these absolutely
free and liberated daubs
of greens and browns
in close-up on the screen.
They are of the earth
in a surprising and counter way
to all that sateen, country houses,
rich people by the yard.
And from my beaten dog pose< ...
Bold shades of autumn leaf – or blazing embers’ light,
bright to extinguished, as if fires set
in hearths huddled closely in the dirt were offset
by pallid oceans with their artificial light.
Are the colours fire-signals to a planetary eye
that, like Atlas, feels the weight of earth,
Having comprehensively disposed of that chestnut,
shoved it on a skip,
I have more questions to put to you than the Socratic
in our grocer.
First, I want you to step out of those non sequiturs, comely
though they are.
I lie on the couch
like a beaten dog
as Philip Mould advances
on his latest art forensics
and there are these absolutely
free and liberated daubs
of greens and browns
in close-up on the screen.
They are of the earth
in a surprising and counter way
to all that sateen, country houses,
rich people by the yard.
And from my beaten dog pose< ...
My Mužka (‘little fly’ in Czech)
Goes softly but she goeth sure.
She stumbles not as larger creatures do,
Her journey’s shorter so she may endure
More puissant than do those who further go.
After Georgia O’Keeffe: Series 1 – From the Plains, 1919 and Back Door with Snow, 1955
‘The essential thing is what we always miss.’
Jorge Luis Borges
...Walking the streets, reading his books
in the cafés and bars, this was his over-
riding question: would he be liked in
prison?
He was not particularly bad, or good, or
graceful, or skeptical. He reckoned he
belonged to the median when it came to
the smokers of Lwów: but would he be
liked in prison?
I was the greatest art potter
but only I knew it,
photographing myself holding signs that read
Unequalled, Unrivalled, and Undisputed