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People are pealing the bells
filling this grey Sunday sky
as if Something Itself were calling
Something and Nothing
what is it you want       they are calling
who thought of the sound of the sky
what do you want
    people are pealing
there is nothing you need
    voices call
in bells all over the sky
beyond this
nothing
beyond this

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White nights
   in this deep African dark –
torn apart, fallen apart,
   cracked open and waiting –
combretum pod, bauhinia leaf, impala lily flower –

smell me, nose in me,
(man so far from me)
come with your cock like a farmer’s arm up a cow
feeling for what stirs in there

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So, is there nothing left but poetry –
and the rest       what cannot be
except briefly, momentarily,
what you might call
‘just a fuck’ but I can tell you I was calling it
I still call it,
not knowing what else to call it  :  love
I don’t really know
‘just a fuck’ I don’t know it
except briefly,
when I don’t know any more, when I’m not sure
when it might be
just a fuck
when two turn to each other, comfortably –

like the way I make
cake, in the afternoon, and we eat it
hot, out of the oven, with tea –
that kind of fuck like a cake
is never just a cake but the one I take
this afternoon to bake, that cake that cracks
in two as I take it from the tin
and my children laughing
my husband calling it
grand
canyon,
and all of us laughing, licking –
sugary, buttery, lemony –

nothing now apart from my body
alone coming waking
words vaguely
like poetry  :

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And in the end it dawns on me
    it isn’t an end, nor a beginning
and what point

to this and what meaning
transitive, or intransitive
at all –

from the still chair
where       I have sat
obliquely as the message on the screen

not like beauty, not like love
poetry is love; it is; I am
too tired of narrative, of my own

story of all the stories
I try to work
out, in, through

the stories     I’m told
resolve mine
so I won’t go into this –

sit in the sun
sit in the absolute
winter still

read this poet
nothing but this
gift, glimpse

nothing I have to make come true.

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Rough on round
    cheek,  rough from the smooth of smooth
generations – rough as the syncopation
    of an unexpected bar
    an unexpected cheek unexpected
                        half-come
cheek growth chin growth
 rubbing like red and longing
 (and just at the wings
 grey – like an angel
 disappearing – into the outers –
come back, fuck me angel
come to ground
like to the slipped notes of
here I am and so alone as I have been
for how many years on earth I can’t count)

can’t count, can’t wait any longer, come ,come,
strange angel
falling, rising, crossing,
only a current
    don’t think o Christ no now she’s turning men into angels
only a current
            urgent

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If I think about how I got here all I can remember are the facts. I came here to come back to reality. I needed somewhere safe again. Love with Prav – not safe. And home, not safe, I didn’t recognise myself there – I lost my place. Like in a novel – lost my place. Now I am everywhere like water flowing into every depression.
And also I was exhausted. I am exhausted: speaking to angels and painting, speaking all the time maybe this is just me but it’s exhausting. Like being the carrier, the conduit of a current, like music – you have to practice and practice and practice and compose compose compose. Exhausting. Making it all up all the time. Was I only imagining?
You can’t make love all the time. Sometimes you have to give birth. And sometimes lie on a rug on the grass. Forget housework. Forget any work. Forget how you look. Forget about cutting your hair let it grow like a bush under your arms out of every depression.

Prav: so young. So supple, so thin, like a young Hindu god – I’m not sure this isn’t what shocked them: their own jealousy. Or maybe it was: paint the object of your desire, but don’t put yourself in the picture. Or for Christ’s sake show some remorse: be a bit guilty.

Even Leonardo, even Botticelli: the hard edges of brick, pillars, tiles – civil authority, propriety – and the landscape only peeped through a doorframe  or falling away behind the terrace – Botticelli’s angel – what I love most is not his youth, his maleness, it’s the way he crouches, winces, as if he’s afraid of his own power – diffident, but concentrated, intense. And the single tree through the doorway like the ekebergia outside this window only of course it couldn’t be.
The sowers of seed. Desire’s produce sprouting all over in its myriad forms, in the little fallings of leaves, lilies, grass and cypresses pushing upward like thick pliable paint brushes. Fabulous phalluses. And all so tender, so soft – so how, why, do I come into the picture in erotic trance? To show myself: wake up, get on with it, your kids are growing up, paint, paint, paint. Look at the lilies of the field. I am the way, life.

A dream, a trance – Prav, our love, even the painting. I kept saying this to Andreas, to Josè, certainly to Carmen: think of the paintings as dreams, I’m telling you my dream. Would you be shocked, ashamed of your own dream. Of course you would. Who isn’t afraid of their own dreams.
Go and see a therapist, Amanda.
Perhaps. But I have the Ching, and my own painting. It helps me see. Don’t you remember what they say about dreams – they’re compensatory: they balance what’s missing. Did I fuck Prav in reality? Who can say – I hardly remember. It was so finite, so infinite, like a dream. But I did paint – was that the transgression? In flagrante – the canvas all red and gold and one obviously open sex  puce, purple, black, though how could anyone have known whose bits were whose, not even I did – I haven’t ever seen myself like that – it was the faces that shocked them. I thought it was the opposite of pornography, I thought that’s what feminists objected to: no face at the other end – well I gave them mine and they didn’t like it.

They liked the previous paintings: death:  mother dying – I painted her in diminishment, in increasing pathos, in pain. Stiller and stiller. They were hard those paintings. Hard. People prefer grief to joy – they’re jealous of joy. Pain they pity.
Put on Beethoven’s appassionata and by the last movement, the one I wept to all that year, now I’m dancing, I’m flying.

I wouldn’t listen to this (from Roberta) but this is what they’re saying; not that I agree, Amanda, but I thought you’d better hear it – they’re also saying this figurative painting’s has-been. Old. Used. Where can you take it? This isn’t new.
I said nothing – I thought : she means I am, has-been, doesn’t she. What I painted, and that I painted it.

Move into the moment – sink, smell; fynbos in heat and sweet as summer sweat – this is what I want – this: to paint it: the smell: the stillness: the heat.
Hexagram 25. Innocence. Heaven’s will. What is heaven’s will? Speak, angel. Without the quality of rightness an unreflecting, instinctive way of acting brings only misfortune. And by the third yin – calamity. I’ve lost my ox. I’ve lost, what? The one that ploughs, the solid, reliable, the working? I have violated modesty and obedience. Yes. I have. It’s true. The traveller gains the ox and this is calamity for the townsman. True. I am suffering as a citizen, as a citizen I have transgressed the Mean. But as a seeker, a traveller?
It’s simply a fact: this has happened. What I began innocently, my painting, has lost me my good standing in the town. Ask again what this means now. What should I do?

Go home. Go back, return to the town. Back to the place where I say to the doctor I’m fine, yes, much better thank you while the world still spins in circles. Ching: you can promise Deliverance, Release, but how do I believe this? How do I let it come? Through what vent do I let it? Through clarity. Through clarity he brings deliverance. Clarity. The resolution of contradiction?  You see, Marx, you were right, even the old ones say so. Clarity: insight: gold from the dross? I don’t want to be good, to be a good painter, to be liked – well, I do, but not as much as I want to be alive. I’m not talking about survival, I’m talking about coming, staying alive. I’m talking about Deliverance. I’m talking about all my wits about me, about listening to the voice of the angel. Hearing, clearly, seeing clearly, making it come clear. If it’s skill, it’s in looking, listening. Meaning? Colour bursting from its wings. Look. I’ll sit quietly angel while I paint who knows what – you will tell me: I’ll bring all my skill, my care. Perhaps it will be sketches I bring back from here. Perhaps it’ll be a dream. Carmen, when she was ten, eleven, perhaps younger, perhaps eight – pouting, sad: a posy of ericas she has picked and the painting saying see how sad she is already, they are drying and already she knows this like my mother before her, the posies, passing, pick them like days. Paint them.

So clear this morning one wants the sun – to sit in it I mean. Rain in the slow building of sudden storms for three days, four days. Green, the grass clear and for the first time in weeks the air clear, mugginess blown away, washed away – and the world moving: the grass, the fields green as they haven’t been since I first got here. Changing. Abundance. Clarity and movement.
Selago – blouaarbos – just beyond the stoep, lilac, deep blue vein, shadowy vein through thin skin at the wrist – fill the whole page with this, fill the whole canvas when I get home – veins of blouaarbos all over the canvas crisscross of branchlets, fragile lilac of flowers, deep purple, the whole of it like the thin sliver of wrist at the base of the hand, just this thin vein this pumping between me and nothing.
Keep drawing so that they take up all the space – the little water lily I pulled up at the dam: all stem and leaf and seen from underneath all murky smudgy and only right at the top in the thinnest sliver of canvas the hint of gold. As if I were there – looking from down in the muck and the stems and the leaves struggling for air.

Don’t worry, say the voices. Abundance for the one who stays free from worry. In the night – breathless, close – heart in my head, thin membrane between the temple and the sheet – to feel how thin it is. Close. Closed sky. Closed cloud. And then the rain and this morning to remember it as if it were only a dream. Don’t worry. Abundance. Sun at midday also passes also goes under also gets up again also goes under don’t worry.

The painting I worried over most, in doing it, over its difficulties – the light, the tones: the skin amber, the visible nipple red black, the belly amber as if the light were coming from under the diaphragm, like in rock pools, the forest water – amber and darker.
it’s too narrow, the focus is too narrow
What, like through the key-hole, through the just-ajar bedroom door?
Yes, what’s the difference between this and pornography?
But the context, the other paintings, surely they were saying this is angelic sex, hot, mad, unmasked, and no doubt about it: the angel likes this best. Announcing. A glowing belly.
So it’s all animus, I can see that, Amanda, but you can’t paint him like a man we’ve seen. Have some pity.
No, No pity. Fuck pity. Do you think an angel shows pity?