I

Ernst’s ample pagan horns
Transumute sunlight into blocks of lead
Pierce the pure cobalt horizon

With dread, forbidden longing.

Cats, cats
Everywhere cats
On the rooftops of Paris

Larger than life,
That’s how the grafitti writers
Wanted them

Bold and beautiful
Perhaps making urban skylines

Bright again.

They creep into the lives
of contemporary Monmartre artists
Reach

Into Pompidou skies.

They teach the scratching lines of Picasso
To curl into swathes of purple
With no attempt

To touch the outlines with the paint
Or fill the spaces between.

II

Braque’s instumentations
Jump into the canvass
Rotate mechanics

Berate all with cries of “we’re not human yet!”

Their fate
To just become
Automatons of motion.

Kandinsky’s thin ink outlines
Hold in the bodies of dancing
Amoeba creations

Keep their glowing thin skins
From showering abstractions
Into the turning Saint-Phalle metallics

Of Pompidou’s infinity pools below.

A mess of Matta’s technical cartoons
Are blown into part life
By explosions of red depth and shaded light

By the breath of an eternal lovers’ night

Burnt into my mind
On a stretched out, landscape canvass
Whose vastness shines and shines

To the sounds of Picabia’s mastery of mechanics
That flatten colours and break time

I yearn to find corners to hide in
Fall down the curves
Unpick the jigsaw designs

Watch the pieces of his thought unwind.

 

This is a poem based upon reactions to works by Matta, Picasso, Erns, Braque and Picabia at the Pompidou Centre, Paris. The version Pompidou Skylines can be found in my collection Dervish Days, available for the Kindle at Amazon.