Liz Adams
airborne
After Jackson Pollock
fling
space through action
it is
all over so that nothing can be read
but everything red
into blue dust sand metal
do talk as that is silence
stroke of line without convention
contact the piece perpetuates
chaos is abandon do the numbers spread evenly?
in that city how alcohol
of go and throw it up so that it must hit the canvas go! go!
at what length how to drip
and make it
resonate what
space
is left
is
white or is it
chaos or
design i can't imagine
ah
eclipse
After Mary Swanzy
layering up the abstract as if appliqued or batik
you move and apply so the halfway house merges with the figurative
and ghost forms leer out of the top of the painting as if the sky
were sliding down in funnels of light and lavender
some swollen blue clouds open around the horse that fades into a
viaduct and still that bridge holds and topples everything until
buildings jut upwards in some suspended foreground as if those
abrupt incisions to the ground were holding up the shadows of a land
there is some sense of mauve that moves in from the left –
it shifts towards the concave shapes that provide some refuge
that is blurring like a solar eclipse – as if that eclipse was working across
the top right of the picture; enter the music of Wagner that cascades
as if the galaxies were falling down and the oppression hovers
over the women’s heads who sit in voluptuous nudity like something out
of Gauguin but still it is as though they were washing their hair or nursing
some newborn babe – this is what happens when the world shifts
beyond recognition it holds its mourners captive in a layered landscape that has
its beauty but more than ever is made up of parts that create some cityscape
geography – how much hope can slide over us now? looking at the sky that seems
to hold all the light in this place made of form and shift and shape, made of air and
the watered strokes of pigment it washes over them all like a thought curled up
and sustained – what do the women grieve for with their found sexualities
arranged in their laps like non-binary gifts? they seek to hold it as though it were a flower –
it was as though the hour had opened, produced its stamen, blossomed, bloomed
bottles, fish
After Georges Braque
splitting up the space into ochre angles that vibrate as the plasticity
of a bottle becomes glass edges and line of darkness before light
blends across its surface again in a single gesture so that the
iridescence that is within shines outwards, illuminates a wall
that moves in the background like water, everything breaks apart –
until a fish head slumps sullenly, decentred without fins, it sticks
out eternally as though preserved in brutalist concrete swallows
the organic and insists on the prominence of angles, and i can’t see
how it will swim this cityscape announces building up until the palest
green appears in one corner, and it’s all corners of a whitened book
flung open with a kind of chaos that has its formulations but insists
on a strategy that holds us vertical as though an iron rod were cast
into the earth and continued upwards for miles, the air hammering
out its contortions so that brown and green and pale yellow escape
from the prominent definition of things and continue into the unending
proposition of the cubic, where structure insists on certain diameters
and the ratio of object and line sits upon a tension that holds the
fish firmly in a dissected riverbed where the earth tones hurl
around in storms of silt, and the sandy blast of air that rags outwards
is the unity and whole of the thing that stands there palely –
Copyright © Liz Adams 2017
Liz Adams's poetry has appeared in Shearsman, Shadowtrain, Stand, The Frogmore Papers, morphrog, #NewWriting, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Lacuna and the anthology Ghosts of Gone Birds (Bloomsbury). Her first book of poems, Green Dobermans, was published in 2011 by Lazy Gramophone Press. She is co-founder of the Phosphorus Collective, and co-hosts the Uncut Poets reading series in Exeter with Alasdair Paterson.