Poetic
Matrix
a periodic letteR on the poetic experience
online spring/summer 2009 letteR 7
Poems Page 5
DIANA FESTA, CHRISTOPHER BARNES
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DIANA FESTA
The Father
I craned my neck to scrutinize the face of God
on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel,
Michelangelo’s majestic vision,
iconic image in strong features, muscular body,
arms extended to create
sun, moon and Earth.
The extraordinary vigor in that figure relives
in the imagination,
the frown and deep ridges corrugating arms and chest,
terrifying eyes, intense yet distant,
a kind of ferocity that inspires
fear more than love.
The face of God -
I miss a sympathetic smile, a touch of pity
in the chapel’s fresco.
Still, that awe-impelling God is
a man, a visionary artist, proud, willful.
Could Michelangelo’s painting have inspired
men’s tolerance for the merciless bent so often found
in world rulers?
Had he given us only the back of God’s head and left
the face invisible, we might imagine
a luster of compassion in that God’s eyes.
But he avoided endowing Him
with what we most cherish,
a gaze of acceptance and love.
If I were to envisage God, He would have
fiery eyes, but a doleful mien, and tears
for men’s struggles, their inescapable suffering
and death.
We would see Him with features
to be worshipped and loved and trusted,
a face closer to our own, the father
we would all like to have.
***
Giant Steps
A ring master in the circus of signs, Fairey makes
meanings jump through flaming hoops.
Carlo McCormick, on Shepard Fairy’s OBEY.
The medium is the message,
I accept it,
pictures are the graphic design of desire.
Jealousy, greed breathe
in canvases of black and white parted
as clouds by gales,
man’s untold passions in streaks of red,
yearnings as tints of yellow and blue.
Shepard Fairey gives us a Che Guevara
in deep slashes of black
on a background of intense red -
a magnet, between tribute and propaganda.
Titans defy monochromatic answers,
we read in the canvas,
they assemble, disassemble in strong tints
strides to uncharted domains.
And the psyche soars.
Che Guevara’s luminous eyes, striking face
in the portrait breathes
lofty ideals in a man of rebellion. He emerges
as a vision that shatters compliance to enclosures
of cement and glass and metal.
We see emblematic figures in Fairey’s portaits,
courage, caring, the struggle against exploitation.
Bordering the eloquence of words,
he builds heroes taking giant steps,
Columbus, King,
and the tacit intimation: make art, not war.
In the huddle of years, everyman could set
on a journey
to the mystical, exalted space, in the wake of
Noam Chomsky, Martin Luther King
************
CHRISTOPHER BARNES
Pavement Art
His mural was first Chinese brushwork
Then, an airbrush inquiry
As I dissolved myself into it.
There is a lonesome, ambivalent intention,
Acrylic bloat, skid over brick.
When I’m square at its assurance
I suss an incidental design
And revel in its form.
***
Popery
What are these Innocents that portraits give us?
Holy Fathers, I commiserate, the dolled-up mortal
Charged by quirks of imperium and standing.
But what are we supposed to feel about them?
Throne, cassock, flourish of trumpets. Brute force!
In those lazy-daisy piped platinum glad rags,
The swish of Eve?
No they are pummelers amongst big battalions,
The ‘they’ in all its plumes, hocus-pocus.
They wear tiny tot swaddling clothes,
A non-stop Christening.
A mutant vaudeville yes, with exotic and high-priced
Trappings, a life lived in the fancy-dress basket.
Velazquez made them so, Bernini made them so
But Francis Bacon gave us Popes as little imbeciles
Screeching for more, the whole time more.
-from the Francis Bacon poems
***
The Artist’s Wife
She loves his slender hand,
through midnight-ebony
and notices the fullness of his tones,
unswallowed before now, doctored,
a tonic to the faintest light.
These are his A1 years
memories built into dozing colours,
each one a mood, a row,
a sullen face at breakfast.
And in the bowls: gunmetal-slate,
smoky red-ink
developing to yellow-rouge.
Always backward-looking glances.
She reinvents a last dusk,
when her love clogged-up his eye,
remembers relics,
invigorations of the studio light, slushes.
And still there are these light-quake greens
chasing away the sallowed dreams
paring from mulberry, or black.
***
Folding Habits
I had an idea of a powder pink donkey-engine.
Dali would put it on stilts
Aloft a fuzzy backwoods
Calling it consciousness, swaying.
But the poet’s donkey-work is repetitive.
The unseen gears perpetually play hide-and-seek
And have to be recalled.
The thinking of a powder pink donkey-engine, therefore,
Has to be transcribed and retransmitted.
The poet’s donkey-work is repetitive.
Here is an impression of a powder pink donkey-engine.
***
Hell’s A Black Vacuum And It Is Human
The Tate tackles a backward look
And at the ice and velvet party,
After the exemptive view,
He is a sorceress in a woolly
He’s worn since the march-past of dawn.
An ink and chalk shirt,
Ripe blue jeans,
Bobbing an eclipsing leather coat,
A picador.
He slugs Moet for this is his rabble,
Unfading beyond midnight’s slump,
Ju-juing the escorts he brought to possess
But bows out alone.
A telegram springs its tenterhooks –
Lacy’s a dead body.
Francis has squandered another lover
And in his mind an image:
On the stocks a tossed back head
Ready for execution.
-from the Francis Bacon poems
***
Septic Portraits
I’ll streak you like a hussy,
black-hearted to the false nails,
sacrifice your eyes
to the glare of cussedness.
Mothered of the dice
you shot and let slip, the irascible gimbals
of the head
like a flint buzzard about to rip
rags of lively flesh.
I’ll illustrate the bending-wire,
the lack of reins,
the very sag in your ligaments,
resentment in the nose.
And in your lips the crushing rebuke
of your worst, most insuperable blunders.
I’ll fight shy of my stunts,
their awful upshots and pretty-pretty slurs,
by blurting out the following trite remark:
I won’t permit your unworthiness
to override my tender heart.
-from the Francis Bacon poems