Wo Licht ist, ist Werden.
Schelling
The oak panel leaning on the easel faces away from view -
a tilted upper case Alpha. As always
...
with apologies to Montale
Gales that played wild and loose all night
with rubbish in the street and flung plastic
forks like confetti round the garden have died
...
According to Lichtenberg
only very few people have ever seen a pure white.
L.Wittgenstein
...
What's beneath the chemicals - gold
chloride, gum Arabic - the gloss,
the yellowish cardboard mount on which
the signature is scrawled?
...
If I had one wish it would be
to have been born two or three
hundred years earlier in Japan.
...
At the station, newspapers, hot
coffees, the metallic smell of departure, the larks
strike their notes, glitzy
overtones from on high after night rain.
...
In the Trans-Alpine struggling uphill to Brennero
our compartment door kept sliding open
and shut again with a small click: the day outside
had trained its wide-angle lens on us.
...
The train made strides on fiery tracks.
Second stop: a melancholy Woodlawn
weeping birches
the sombre organization of spruce.
...
of water and paints a winding road by the sea
a blue-slated house with a narrow green
stair case and a window sill on which two apples
and three oranges lavish
...
'...deeper than did ever plummet sound//
I'll drown my book.'
Prospero in The Tempest. Shakespeare
Act V Scene 1
...
Eva Bourke is an Irish poet. Bourke was born in Germany but has lived for much of her life in Galway, Ireland. She studied German Literature and History of Art at the University of Munich. She has had five volumes of her own work published, as well as publications as editor and translator. She is a member of Aosdána. She was editor of the Writing in the West supplement of the Connacht Tribune for six years, and for over a decade has participated in the Galway Writer's Workshop. She lectures on contemporary Irish poetry in Austria, Hungary, Germany, the United States and Ireland. As of 2011, she is editing a German translation of a collection of the poet Friedrich Hoelderlin.)
Artist in his Studio
Wo Licht ist, ist Werden.
Schelling
The oak panel leaning on the easel faces away from view -
a tilted upper case Alpha. As always
the beginning is shrouded in darkness.
Its shadow falls across sun-drenched floor boards
which are infiltrated by woodworm
writing the endless genesis of anobium punctatum.
The artist against the back wall is no more than 23
and no taller than an index finger,
dressed up, it appears, by travelling clowns
in lace, cambric and slouched velvet hat,
a proper dandy, were it not for the hob-nailed boots
peering out from under his robe.
Only the tools of the trade: mortar and pestle,
plank table, palette on a hook
instead of Persian carpets, fruit bowls from Delft,
no mappa mundi but outlines and faint marks
of unknown territories, river beds, caravan routes
on the discoloured whitewash.
A paint brush is poised like a surgical blade
about to make an incision in the heart of the world
in undying hunger for more world
on a canvas small enough to vanish inside my briefcase
together with panel, artist and brush -
the knife that dissects the shadow.