Poem No.1. In the Clarity of Daylight.
"The boy has an eye"
Picasso said,
Standing in the doorway
The prodigy at his elbow.
They stepped from the silent studio
Into the packed out house,
The kitchen exotically informal
Ecstatic with a kaleidoscope of languages.
"The boy has an eye"
He repeated,
First in French then in Catalan,
His leathery face snipped open
By the shard of a smile.
"But also an ear"
He might have added with style
Provoking the usual surprise.
But then Picasso could be sharp as a needle
Extracting an unexpected melody
From a pristine groove,
A direct cut Master copy;
Mood music expressed in pure colour,
Pure line.
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Poem No.2.The Mythologies of Night.
In the shuffled card pack of daily life
Picasso knew his place
And rather liked the kudos.
An exuberant master of theatre
He devised a ballet of shadows
On the wall of his dining room.
With a flick of a wrist he turned on a single spotlight,
The entertainment was ace.
Antique mythology underpinned the daring plot line,
A satellite spinning somewhere deep in space
Top lit the Minotaur`s doom.
The spotlight clicked off,
The audience sat still in the gloom.
A shuffle of paper puppets, Theseus being packed off to his bed
in an old brown box by the lampstand,
A sarcophagus for the mysterious dead.
Out in the distant woods the awakening Cicadas caroused
The ascent of the solitary moon.
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Poem No.3. Colour & Music, A Dance to the Vollard Suite.
When I caress your body
Before we are truly awake
I can hear a concord of symphonies that affirm you
Sung in perfect unison.
Choristers unencumbered by any language
Greeting the clarity of morning sunlight
In water colour rainbows of music.
A visceral first light elemental chorus
In symbiotic balance with our morning love making.
The wild world flaunting its mayhem
Deep burrowed, haunting our feral dreaming.
The Minotaur, half awake in the undergrowth,
Counts out pale morning stars
Like funny money.
Small change that can never, in measured time, be brokered
Slowly melting like ghost pence, fading to nothing
In the Balearic dawn light.
Orpheus and Eurydice
Sing out their feral love songs
without restraint
Beneath the May Day blossom,
The delicately swaying boughs.
They barely notice the dark waves
Slowly eroding the shoreline
Of the bow shaped southern coast.
Death has yet to overcast their black Provencal eyes,
Or set the wild beasts yowling.
But when I settle down to sketch your portrait,
You sprawled across the bed, pale Aphrodite,
The shell shocked goddess of the wine dark sea;
The Minotaur, blear eyed, cartwheels like a drunkard,
Or the Sun crashed Icarus gripped in tourniquet wings;
Cartwheels roaring into my private apartments;
This half mad doppleganger with a grip of steel.
.
He grabs the palette and knife straight out of my fingers
And rushes headlong at the unfinished canvas
To complete my work, reveal himself the true Artist.
He cuts loose a primeval shriek of animal passion,
My raw imagination exposed in his muscular brush strokes
Dashed blindly against the weave:
I cannot resist the energy of his flaying.
He fights to delineate your features, my Aphrodite
Your inner song, on fire within the pigments,
Deep burning into a timeless, a visceral sound scape
A portrait in colour, extemporized like folk music
Compelled by an intractable rhythm,
The wild fire of our seeing,
The mad pain of our loving,
The staccato beat of our lives.
---------------------------------------------------
Poem No.4. The Artist and The Schoolboy.
The artist stared straight into my eyes
As I sat still in his studio
Vainly trying to magic up a safe disguise,
A hat to hide under.
"The truth shall set you free , my boy",
he said
With a twinkle in his animal eyes
That sliced far down through me
Like diamonds cruel as ice.
Or perhaps, after a glass or two of the best
Shared with lovers, disciples, critics, friends
On a quiet, platinum beach
Reflecting the sun
Down by the vodka white sea,
Truth would be put to the test
And on occasion found to be wanting.
_______________________________
Poem No. 5. Feral Art.
How to be an enigma
Is all that I have ever learned
from you
Picasso.
Perhaps
An artist must always be set back
From the daily treadmill
That ensnares both poor and rich
In their efforts to remain alive,
Barely, but simply, alive.
Yet the artist has no other choice
But to stand alone, far back,
Tied down in the brittle scar tissue
Of the ins and outs of a life.
How else can we clearly observe
The variegated ways of the world
With a knife edged, untarnished eye,
Like a sleek cat hunting at night
Enigmatic,
A cat stone still on the roof
Intent on assassination
Before she slinks home, like a ghost,
To drop her small gift by the gate,
Her comment on everyday life,
A remark to be noted, proscribed?
___________________________
Poem No.6. The Epilogue?
Perfection demands an enigma
A never to be answered question
The unlikely absence of flaws
The stillness of meditation
Transposed by a living hand
Into porcelain
Wood or stone
The sounds of Bach on the radio
Your portrait displayed by the door
Picasso up on the shelf
Perfection demands an enigma
The grace of the Venus de Milo
The eradication of Self
Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
May 6th. - 17th. - 20th. - 21st. 2013. - August 8th. - 9th. 2013.
Provencal Magic 1957, is a single work comprising of six interconnected poems.
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