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Ida Fasel
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Bonnard on Location
He worked fast to catch the light
—
commonplaces in light –
landscapes like jewels looking in
through a window, rich green, the sky
as true to blue as blue could mean
to one sufficient in his home and art.
A door ajar, rooms of a house,
Simple things going on in a house
—
A dog, a cat, a woman at table: Marthe.
Principally Marthe. Marthe in
the stillness of her bath, shimmering
in gleams of yellow, golden orange,
coral rose like some unearthly being,
or guest of her glass, a shining one,
her robe forming itself to its folds
like a rainbow, arching halo by halo.
Marthe, a hundred paintings of her.
From 30 on she never aged.
Color tells the truth of the world,
black and white only its paradoxes.
The luminous takes its text from within,
every brushstroke a reverence.
Sparks of color, luminous expanses,
bright molecules under physical
pressure of feelings, calmed as he gave
familiar things the facts of light they
have.
Violet cool inside.
No need to tell the days apart.
Sitting time, lying down time, eating time,
mirror time. Color and Marthe.
To his friends a stingy woman
with a stinging voice. Color spirals
inward on swirls of color.
The way he knew her. For life.
Dali in Love
The stairwell of his mind endlessly
captivated him to climb. Stars made
strobe lights of dream’s abundance.
Innards dangled from the immense belly
of the universe, limp and solid.
His resless eyes pierced the dark abyss
of consciousness and gave things
not of the world their shape —
rapture with a reality of its own kind.
Only Daly doing this. Dali Dali Dali
loves Gala better than his mother, better
than his father, better than Picasso,
and even better than money.
That serene face, that glowing body,
that orderly mind finely tuned to his
tempered his inner tumult and put bounds
to his boundless careening.
My wife, brush
never pell-mell.
Her face in profile, leaves sprouting from
her head. Tree of his creative life.
Her body in full form, front or back.
Sometimes glimpsed in a surreal landscape
or bordered like a Valentine in lace
or abiding like a guardian angel: mad about her.
When she came from her house to his,
he sat her in the light
and took on light himself.
Their marriage became a shared conversation
that kept on getting better,
she in a deep gaze,
he talking from the clouds.
But how well she was spoken of
over and over
whatever his manic symmetry
and mighty painter’s means
in immeasurable taste for life
established the center of the world.
Brushstrokes to wait out, then
glass to glass,
bubbles nimbly pacing a laugh.
Note: The italicized words are his.
