Re-painting the Cave with Jackson
unformed figure, Jackson Pollock, 1953
When he returned with his learning,
full of bombast and new ideas,
his travel sacks bulging with bright tins
that sprayed thick liquid, which,
eyes shifty with mischief,
he would demonstrate to anyone prepared to watch,
while declaring how bored he was
with the clumsy stick figures of cattle,
the sketchy outlines of people,
scratched in
all that long time ago and fading, the walls yellowed
with smoke from our fires, blotched with the smudges
of naughty-fingered children, the stains
of badly-cooked food thrown by angry men and boys;
we began, cautiously at first, to listen.
He revealed the instability of our reds,
our yellows, tossed out the iron ore we’d used to mix them,
our well-worn pestles and mortars, warmed by skilled
and loving hands, while mocking our charcoal blacks,
our crumbling chalk-whites.
We women shuffled and muttered,
about his bizarre contraptions that could spray
the highest ceiling without the need to puff dizzily
into bird-bone blowpipes,
but our men and boys listened to his rant,
fingered his stiff new brushes, rubbed them on their cheeks,
their bare chests, relished the prickly tufts.
They made us go elsewhere while they peeled
and scrubbed away the old shapes, the lean-haunched
gazelles, bristling with arrows, the hunters bent to their bows,
our short-legged, hammock-bellied horses,
but rumours drifted up to us on the hill
where we’d been sent to wait:
of terracotta bodies, bare and writhing, in a colour richer
than the rusty brown of wild plum root,
and slashed through with yellows, a chromium that dulled
the old dyes of broom, lichen gold, and of deeper greens,
not found on trees or hillsides.
Invited to view his masterpiece, we stood, blinded
by this orgy of naked colour, already pining for our past.
Wendy Klein’s first collection, Cuba in the Blood, was published by Cinnamon Press. A second, due out in early 2013, is being honed at present. This is her first submission to Ink Sweat and Tears.
Repainting the Cave with Jackson, is published in last year’s Aesthetica .