Taking to the marshes
Holding my Brueghel
Book
His pictures show
Cruelty and indifference
I love him for that
For in cruelty is all
That goodness intended,
Gone bad
Just like a Chardin Apple
So in the painting
‘The fall of Icarus’,
Where all around there is
Indifference
We know
That this may have been us
Or may happen to us
When no one looked or cared.

And in ‘Hunters in the snow’,
The cart ran over
The girl went hungry
While others fun themselves
Ate and made merry
Others died from want.

In the marshes
They found him
Swept up from
The sea.


Love Mary xxx2018 december

By the river just outside Paris George Seurat
Painted his tree trunks using black conte crayon
In a cream sketchboook
The year was 1893.
Critics say of this work,
All most black,
That it is hovering between
Regularity and irregularity
Reversing the lights and shades
I think he was just trying to get it right.

Love Mary x

Two eyes appeared from under a broadrimmed hat.
They looked around with astonishment.

In a schoolroom, far off in the distance, a boy was
Busy making a wooden bowl.
The teacher unaccustomed to such slowness
Requested a completion date.
“I am not slow thought the boy, just working
Away until I get it right.”
He met the teacher’s gaze with an expression
Of opacity and a sense of bewilderment.

On another day, at a later date, this same boy
Was found in his metalwork class applying
Cylinders of gases to his small creation, quietly,
Hoping for a connection before he was blown
To smithereans. Two blue eyes concentrated as
The jets of flames hissed into space.
Too long the gases flowed.
The master rose, the boy shook and his eyes
Widened.

In a playground, sometime earlier,
A small boy could be seen playing without a coat.
Gossiping women spoke of this unnatural act,
This exception to the fold. The boy stared back
Hearing their words with his eyes.

Decades later when his hair had turned from
Brown to grey but his eyes were still blue
And wide apart, he painted a little ***
Sitting on a pale surface, gazing into nothingness.
This painting took him a long time.
He had to get it right, the tones , the lines,
The connections.

After he finished ‘Little ***’, he sat down
And stared into the two blue blobs set wide
Apart on its surface and he thought, “this is
Me, the boy, the man, the painter, of wide
Apart, unnameable moments.”

The Beginning.

Love Mary ***

I will speak with you dear friend
Though my heart aches
And all our beauty offends
This state of disintegration.

For my love carries to the end
Its bruised fruit
Resting down upon a table
Where we shared.

And every brush stroke
Stole my eye a surprise
And I never cried for sorrow
On that wooden chair.

I will speak with you dear friend
For if this be our last time
Let the apple and the pear
Bear the departing hour.

Love Mary

Can you see it that nomadic crowd jostling
For space
Standing in front of their favourite icon
Shuffling from left to right
To get a better view.
The room sways with the heat
And iPhones click, flick
Behind knitted gloves.
Picasso does not smile back
He is too busy with his legacy
Now handled by many
While he sleeps in his Château
Graveyard.
Tatters of conversations
Continually talk of
Sexuality and his women,
Usually to the negative,
Other than those who
Might see beyond this
To the structure of drawing
And years of observation
That brought him to
This spot.
What do we take with us
Leaving for the streets,
A catalogue?

Behind almost all things
Where the trees meet the edge of the frame
It could have been not this but that
In the distance is a darker shape
Its  position decided on a collection.


Falling like snow without regularity
The canvas surface is patches of colour
Horizontals and verticals intersect
The park with its green avenues
Glides in and out of a century of stories.


Its conclusion resting
On a final brush stroke.

Love Mary xxxxx

Standing on this wintery day of branches in May
Take from your mark a measurement between
Thumb and brush
And in proportion place it down
On canvas neatly primed
To pinpoint those places sound
The sky and the ground .
Slowly as each day allows
Measuring, a steady streak
Of edgily painted parts
The picture to complete.

Love Mary

On the grass you laid down your palette
Usually, white, two yellows, two reds,
Two blues and occasional viridian green.
From these you could mix every colour
You might need.
With sensitivity and a palette knife
You brought the avenue of trees to life.
It depended on mood or season of light
The temperature of day
The time must be right.
Sometimes limited colours
Helped to create
The surface's luminosity
Using yellow ochre
red, black and white.

Love Mary ***

You're  here today in your spot
Where the footpaths cross
And a little to the left
Under those tall trees
On a patch of flat earth.

Across the grass to the right
The old Plane, magnificent
In structure spreads branches
Like a globe of lightest green
Catching the glittering  sun.

Your easel, an old brown relic
With leather carrying handle
Held together by a strap
Carries your canvas and paints
Whilst you wear a tweed cap.

And what I like, standing back
To watch, is the quiet consistency
Of observation; two living forms
Joining in the imagination
To create beauty and truth.

Love Mary

No one faced it as Picasso
With such an honesty
Baring the truth of
Simply wearing out.
His last portraits,
Full of anxiety,
Eyes laden with fear,
But at least he had it,
That creativity,
To give each day a point.
And what he left us all
Was more than beauty
But the humanity
Shared by all
To take us safely
Home.

Love Mary x


Love Mary ***

Manet in his final days painted
Flowers.
A collection of the most beautiful
Living gestures and gratitude
For his life.
Sixteen small paintings
Of cut flowers in vases
Sorrow's tears falling
As petals to the table.
Already cut, these blooms
Await their own slow demise
And seem as a metaphor
For Manet himself.


Do this for me, I ask,
Watch each flower as it opens
Know it is there
To kiss away
The tears
Of goodbye.


Love Mary ***

Michael leiris said of Picasso

Everything we love is about to die,
And that is why,
Everything we love must be summed up,
With all the high emotion of farewell,
In something so beautiful we shall never forget it.


And this is true of us poets, too.
So those moments we loved
Are captured with such beauty
That the heart is taken back.

Love Mary xxxx

The artist and the model.

When I draw you I create both of us anew,
Your form fills my eyes and I am moved,
I take from you myself, and all my idiosyncrasies.
You are my voice calling its name,
I try to find what is beauty,
Through line and mark and scale,
I give this back to you as Love,
A drawing on a page.

Love Mary