Fondation Hartung Bergman Poems 1

Half of the sequence of poems I wrote at juice's amazing residency in France with MaJiKer. If I wasn't writing music I was writing poems. Many of these reference Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman, the artist couple who built, lived and worked at the incredible modernist residence.

everything that they needed is still here:

light that kicks on white stone

birds snipping diamonds out of the air

cloud-drift rasping over the pines,

which have an assuredness I’m envious of

olive trees, three hundred years old,

lean their elbows on the walls

of the pool, taking in the water

and its merry-making with light –

a paint-fight, happily spattered,

like those canvases which didn’t stop,

their arteries spraying out onto the

vast concrete walls

***
the canvas is stabbed like a heart,

the knife yanked back and it all comes

gushing out, a life-flash in paint:

the explosion of birth the hurt the love

the shouts of joy the mixing of languages

bodies juices the babble the tongues

the thousands of hands clamouring

the battles the shocks the rain

a race down the zip-line of memory

one long ululation towards death

***

and at night

when the winds are still

the pool becomes a dreamtime

unbreathing, you swim up to walls

which turn you and turn with you

showing their ancient, secret side

- Anna-Eva, dreaming of Miro:

her violet-black rooms and iridescent cave-shapes

of things you never thought possible

blueprints for mazes and animal kings

men who can fly, the shape of the sun’s eye

and otherworlds connected by shining threads

breathing and in the air again

the patterns of the pool dance

a fire-circle in your skull

***

and now it’s just me and the night

and the clouds that are like galaxies falling in

Hartung moves along the walls, spraying

orange tree-shadows on the stone

and I’m sure something will rise up out of the pool

or maybe the pool itself will lift, a slab of water

levitating above its grave, defying it

each star has a different plumage and way of hovering

and each is waiting to swoop and pluck out my tongue

we think the sky is arced

but it is us, leaning back on our heels

trying to pull the universe around us like cloak

The sky just

is.

***

Diet

there’s lemon, and rosemary,

and pink petals lolling in hot water

daisy-fresh goat’s cheese

and tapenade black as rain-rich earth

anchovies, eggs seduced by butter

and tomatoes loosening in their skins

but I suck, stickylip, on the sun’s last fingers

its sugarcreamspongepuddingness, drip drip…

***

the pines’ rusting bars prong open

the shadows lean the other way

I inch my way along the wall, mugging

like a criminal in a silent comedy

trying to stay in the sun

***

Chet.

the night is a wallflower finally chosen

each star-speck flicked onto shimmer-mode

as his trumpet picks them out, one by one

and that voice

the pool unstills, shivers as his vibrato

slinks in, playing with its light-ribbons

his phrases powdering into indigo breaths

which tinge the far hills

***