‘Art Therapy’

She swims across the ocean…. Prose poem to an anonymous artist.

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I know too much? Ideas obstacles, they obscure the view, when I look at this work, the ribcage of your mind. Celia directs my gaze to another wall; that tight red tile, its slivers of silver, where black contours splinter on the vermilion’s heavy wave. An island sinks into the sea. John mentions brain; Celia nods a head, though other associations float down those river veins; one day to reach the delta of her artist’s fingers. I return to this cold stove. With sweet luminescence, its jelly green, that trifle light, carved from one sheet of iron, a soul shines out between its window bars. The prison-house of words has constructed a sentence-cell…is this what I see? I turn from the green light, look again at the blood-soaked ocean, think of boats sailing to new Americas: my eyes a harbour, I the country they’re heading for? ‘Brain’ sets up a naval blockade…. Bang! Bang! A mind disintegrates into its body; storm blasts of memory rafting towards a blank white wall. You laugh! Call me a fool! carried away on a torrent of mad thought. Stop! you say, your green lights twinkling between those grey lids. I do stop, and let doubt, no, Deidre Dalliance-Doubt - Waugh smiles from the shelf - pick at my mind. I know too much? Iron twisted like wood, a skull drowning in its own liquid, that strange life-force: mere materials, just aesthetic forms, or meanings for magicians to conjure with? Meaning, can it ever be innocent….

A mind holds itself together by clinging onto another’s look. 

The artist cuts out her spirit in a rectangle of iron; fixes mercury with her brush strokes. Whoah! I throw my doubts overboard. I too can peep around my concepts. What are words after all…mad, crazy, lunatic…shavings we sweep up after the show. John shakes his head, talks as if words are like frozen chicken thighs. I shake my head! No. Words are shapeshifters; moulding themselves around place and time; quicksilver on canvas, iron changed into apple peel. I place my paragraphs in the furnace and fire them into pottery. Words. Not a roadblock, nor a car-clogged motorway, but pigmented paths, ley lines, across open countryside, taking me to valleys invisible. I play with that ‘crazy’, use ‘mad’ to etch new visions into my cranium: a grass track through banks of steel; footholds painted on a deep red pool; and Celia; Celia drawing in the dark, while moonlit ghosts invade her canvases, I give one my sunglasses.

Doubt assails me: these shavings are sculptured mental, this quicksilver never to slide off this wall…. 

Fool! they say. Listen. Listen to us! Chalice the magic. Melt into metamorphosis. Noticing my distraction, they frown at my uncertainty; then grab my eyeballs, thrusting them against those iron bars. I yelp in pain at this abuse of metaphor. They laugh at my literalism. Lithe, aren’t you? They mock. Then frown. Then grow serious. Out comes a lesson in aesthetics, twisting me into new shapes, the gymnastics of the soul. I bow my head. Apologise for my obscurantism. The jelly light radiates my face, the red sea showers me in its glory. I look again, think harder, flatten myself thin, and squeeze in between those iron bars. Words discarded like clothes I jump into this artist’s ocean. You hear us, surely, splashing around.