Transitory

There is something exciting and disturbing when a different perspective gives you a new interpretation of what was known and ordinary.
          The literal cutting away of obstruction - although I don't think that I would count trees as an obstruction - has changed the daily 'view' that I have when I go for my swim.  The new sight lines show me nothing new, after all I have seen everything that I am looking at hundreds of times before, but not in the same alignment.  The visual relationships that I was used to have gone.  It was an understanding of being slightly unsettled that prompted me to explore my feelings and eventually gave me the starting point for the following poem.
          I am assuming that Rothko is an artist who forms part of the gallery of the well known artists whom you can mention without being elitist.  Certainly, if the cost of his paintings is anything to go by then he is up there with Pollock and Picasso!
          I have nothing against concrete, it is just that it seems to be spreading in my daily haunts and that encouraged me to write.


Transitory

i.

A patch of flattened earth

is never featureless.

It might appear to be

a single colour smudge

of dun, compacted dust.

But then you see

an isolated stone,

its shadow; note

the border fence

that, like a canvas edge,

gives structure to the view.

And so I Rothko what I see,

and press dimensions to a plane:

green scrappy trees a school away

fill up the top; the middle band

comprises dark and scribbled brown,

a fence abutting a light band of brick.

The foreground: bottom’s

sandiness advances to my feet

inviting me to step.

ii.

The rain last night

was a retreating tide

that micro levelled

dozers’ flattened trails

and candy-coated stranded twigs

in drying dirt that took the light

iii.

Vacant space accepts

complexity that gestures by

the breeze and sun and

passing feet inscribe.  

But soon concrete oblivion

will press all down to

uniformity. 

In time, the marks will reappear,

be made again in what appeared
to be so hard.

If you have been following what I have written recently, then you will recognise this poem as being another part of my response to the cutting down of the twenty trees that used to be in the car part of my local swimming pool.  With the world falling apart, with crisis following crisis and corruption poisoning every aspect of life it is perhaps ironic that the cutting of, frankly, quite ugly trees has traumatised me to the extent that it has!  Perhaps its a form of emotional displacement activity!