How to leave something alone.

I’ve stuck another poem here.  First though here’s a passage from the brilliant film/play ‘Six Degrees of Separation’.

How easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months,

and then, one day, he loses it. Loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting. I remembered asking my kids' second-grade teacher

"Why are all your students geniuses? Look at the first grade - blotches of green and black. The third grade – camouflage. But your grade, the second grade...Matisses, every one.  You've made my child a Matisse. Let me study with you. Let me into the second grade.  What is your secret?”

“I don't have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them.”

Ouisa Kittredge - Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare

This stuck in my head from when I first saw it at the cinema in 1994.  The idea that knowing when to stop is as important to the artist as knowing what to paint or how to begin.  The reason I mention it now is as a preface to this poem which I wrote in about 30 minutes, from just a title, as an exercise.  I liked how it came out but having had constructive criticism at a poetry workshop and then spent several sessions try to edit and improve it, I’m still not happy.  It’s no Matisse but if I keep messing with it I’ll lose it completely.  But rather than keep fiddling with it indefinitely I thought I’d release it into the wild.  I need to write something else!  I suppose it could form a trilogy with the other two I posted up here. 

Summer Nights

Shivering defiantly in the dark, fleeces zipped snug to our chins,
under a peak sky that's ours alone,

silent-still and clear as the beginning of the world.
Then admiring the city girls, dressed tissue-thin with feet caged,
as the sodium stains into the dark

and the day's heat bleeds from  the bricks.

The bedroom’s full of soupy air and we’re snoozing sheet-tangled

in a web of each other, half listening to the taxi traffic that

breaks like waves outside the open window.  

The silences lengthen like shadows

until the dawn claims the day and sends them home

 to their beds and tired-eyed day jobs.

The feeling that the year's on the wane already and that the best has gone.
We're on the long slide now, hardly moving but slowly picking up speed,

back-to-school, harvest songs, halloween and fireworks.

Blinds shut and the curtains drawn in the damp-dark of tea time

with only the wind’s breath in the chimney

and eyes lit up with the TV’s light.

You faded in the spring and were lost from sight in the summer.
Come home with an autumn gale behind you in a cloud of falling leaves.

David Millington

27^th February 2011

Nottingham