Cleave: a Story & a Moral

BACK in 2009, I was asked by the Newcastle Art Gallery to make a poem in response to one of the works in their permanent collection. Poets Paint Words, I think the project was called. It was an exercise in ekphrasis, part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival (back when the Sydney Writers’ Festival still made much space for poetry). And the gallery got to choose the art work. To match-make a painting and a poet.

The painting I was matched with was the huge abstract expressionist work “Kentish Fire and Heavy Boots” by Robert Jack. All kinds of tertiary-coloured triangulations, painted in oil on a massive canvas. There was no spark between us, no love at first sight, nor second, nor third. Not my kind of scene at all, though a striking piece of work.

I sat with the canvas, which is very large (perhaps three metres by a metre and a half) for as long as they’d let me in the gallery. Then they gave me some colour repros of the work, and I carried them away to the lockup, where I was staying on a brief residency. I sat to write, and nothing happened. I took a walk instead. Something happened then. I describe it in the opening lines of the poem I wrote the next day:

“Last night I sat on the seawall and watched a woman in a purple bra,

Slow black hair falling past her wist, dancing alone in a lighted window

Two storeys up at midnight…

There are things

I cannot turn from, and this was one, a study in muted abandon, probably

Probably not meant for me. But, hey…”

Can you hear the ekphrasis begin? “a study in muted abandon”. And then soon after: “I live my life in curves, my love, and you live yours in fractals”—a reference as much to the painting and my struggle with it as to the conditions on the ground in my heart. And so I begin, in the poem, a recollection of a walk—or perhaps I imagined it, that walk as I took it alone—with the woman who was then my wife, around The Hill and downtown Newcastle, one of us walking our curves, the other, the fractals. The poem’s syntax is sinuous, its sentences long; its form, on the other hand, is angular: six long-lined sestets, each other line indented—a jagged affair, across which are strung a long and sensuous sentences, an argument against the painting’s forms performed in its own colours.

I didn’t warm to the painting, so I fought with it. I took a walk in two points of view at once, contending with what I thought I didn’t like in the painting and in my life and coming away with something a lot like beauty and even more like a charged peace. In life and in the poem, I ended up down near the port, and in the port two cranes, “slowdancing with midday, arms above their heads.” I discovered that if you look at it right, if you learn to see, if you stop bifurcating the curve and the plane, even industrial plant can put on a sensuous show. And so I ended at a kind of reconciliation, in which the fractals became the curves, the steel became the flesh, the machine became the dance.

I think in behind “I live my life in curves, my love, and you live yours in fractals” something my cousin Elizabeth, an artist, once said to me when I took a life drawing class she led in Canberra. Looking at my sketch of the model in charcoal on cream butcher’s paper, she said: “it’s the lines that hold the curves together; you’re catching all the curves, but you’re missing all bones.”

I called my poem “Cleave,” and you can find it in Fire Diary. “Cleave,” of course, means two contradictory things: to hold tight, as if two things were one; to sunder. The poem that came to me is a pondering of the contradictory nature of reality, of live experience, of love, of all truths, I guess. I was asked to find something worth saying in a work I found no sympathy with, took no delight in; I was asked to transcend my taste; to look for merit and find something of oneself in something I didn’t much like. I’m glad to have been asked. I’m grateful for the poem and what it revealed to me. I’m astonished at the generative, magical, shamanic power of art—how it can fashion responses from the mind that no argument or reason ever can.

I think the experience of making this ekphrastic poem was a parable in several dimensions, a story with half a dozen morals. Among them: tolerance; be slow to judgment; be led by what you do not love more deeply into what you do—sometimes, as Joseph Campbell wrote, the cave you least want to enter is the one where your destiny lies; love what you love, but teach yourself to see the value and beauty in forms and ideas that don’t conform with your taste; don’t mistake your taste for the truth; some of us do live in curves and others in fractals and vive la difference, and so it goes (but so it may not always stay).

I found the image in a box on Sunday when I was tidying my study. It’s been sitting there for eighteen months under one end of my desk. The cat had taken to sitting in it in the sun. But a cardboard crate has a way of making a space feel impermanent, so I emptied it. In it, among much else, only some of which I kept, two exercise books from 1970, my English book and my poetry book, which my mother had found and given to me a few years back, and a manilla file containing the photocopies of “Kentish Fire and Heavy Boots.”
This time, all these years later, it was its beauty that struck me, and at once I was on Wolfe Street again; I was walking the edge of the sea at Newcastle Main Beach, and up by the Bogey Hole, and the lines from my poem (“I long for the body of the world with a purity that would shame a mystic” and “a hundred surfers, so many recumbent monks” and "thirteen tankers…like a pod of whales, a convivial moeity of heavy industrial behemoths…”) came back to me as if they had been written by the painting itself, and I was glad of a painting I had once not liked. I was all the feelings you get to be at once, complex as a poem or a painting, when you live a while and take your chances and write some of them down. I was silence, and I was wildness and fire, and I was the sun, like a klaxon, in a catatonic sky.