FAR FROM ROME by Vahni Capildeo

The blue dusk settles at a rate,

and fields can be forgotten

as they are; as-they-were appear

uppermost, lidded, swept smooth;

beneath, left still, kiln-fired

vessels belonging to him,

pleasing to his strong, torn hands –

so very much not in Rome,

this redeployed general.

The sea mixed in your eyes,

arrived at cruel decisions

yet stalling execution.

I would have sworn to die for you

sooner than try to live with you.

The sea swarms in my ears.

I sift your breath through mine.

A modern probe might take me

for less-than-human remains,

for nail-seed dirt and cumin.

I wouldn’t mind; being her,

and yours.

            But not in this life –

the intolerable one

which, when the blue dusk scratches,

lends it my eyes. To discern,

alone, your life, indicts me.

Such knowledge a reburial.

Turn me to copper, one of you

gods he only temporized with:

melt me down then score me

the music for last things.

Readings for February

Nick Owen            Our father             Bust of Thomas Combe               Pre-Raphaelite gallery

Diana Moore                                       The Tallard Madonna                  Early Italian gallery

Vahni Capildeo          Far from Rome          All Roman Remains              Gallery 13

Debbie Moogan   ‘the hunt in the forest"                 Early Italian gallery

Jenifer McGowan   Being British in gallery 21 statue of Clio             Randolph gallery

Tina Negus   WINGED INANNA as MISTRESS OF BEASTS.                Sumerian gallery

Gallery Readings for 25th January 2014

Paul Surman - The Dog Speaks ~ Gallery 43 -- Italian Renaissance --  Second Floor

Diana Moore  --  Two Bream and a Ray 'Come Dine With Me' --  Gallery 13  -- Rome --  Fish Plate -- Ground Floor 

Dr Jennifer McGowan -  Story Of A Young Man Told By A Melon -- Gallery 46 -- Baroque Art  --Second Floor

  after Cecco della Caravaggio, “Interim with a Still Life and a Young Man Holding a Recorder”

Tony Vincent Isaacs - Guido's Light -- Gallery 8 -- Guy Fawkes Lantern -- Ark to Ashmolean -- First Floor

Lucinda Kowol   Grave Goods  -- Gallery 19  -- Ancient East -- Ground Floor  

Mary Stableford -  'Goodbye-ee'  -- Gallery 63 -- 'The Brighton Pierrots' by Walter Sickert  Third Floor

Gallery Readings for December 7th 2013

Times:  12.30 - 1.30  and   2.30 - 3.30 p.m.

Poet                       Poem                                Object                                            Gallery

Diana Moore    Flamingo Calypso           Flamingo painting                    Jameel Centre

Dr Jennifer McGowan   Cyrano de Bergerac as a Cardinal in Old Age  after bust by Pierre LeGros

                                                                                                                                                       Baroque gallery

Peter Mallin    Convent Thoughts, Charles Allston Collins          Gallery 67

Nick Owen    Flesh and Bones, the spirit of an age      all works   Moore Bacon Exhibition

Paul Surman     GLITCH                      After Francis Bacon                   Moore Bacon exhibition

Poem on Francis Bacon

Putrefying flesh; the spirit of an age

and the life of Bacon’s Man

Poor, mean, ugly, British and short

With a nod to Hobbes’ Leviathan

My work is not violent

Reality does that so much better

Fifty years ago

Bacon was elevated to the status of a God

while showing us everything most vile

about sex between man and man

“You are born, you fuck, you die.”

It made me mad, it made me want to cry.

Fifty years from now

I want to see these pictures

on the walls of Auschwitz

a lasting, memorable tribute

to man’s inhumanity

to man  

his flesh so pink

not cooked

just melting

in the pan.

The subject is subjected

pinned

he squirms, twists, turns

to not be seen

obscene.

He took the perfect order

beauty in the images he found

and “messed” with them

distorted them

disturbed them

till the goodness

oozed

like blood and puss

upon the ground.

His crucifixions

are self portraits

they stare back at us

not in transcendence

but to condemn

the ones who dare to gaze upon

man’s violence

perpetrated

on his fellow man.

We are voyeurs, not viewers

holding on to what would not be held

within our looking, in our gaze

his victims desire escape

they try to vanish

seeking to be lost in a haze.

He gives us antidote to beauty

a kind of porn that is not porn

for everything that could be beautiful

is smudged or torn.

He tells us we are born

just to fuck

and die

yet this is what our galleries

and muse-eums

are keen to buy

I wonder, why?

©Nick Owen                                             December 2013

Vanity confronting truth

So, 

this is truth, who has arrested me,

just when I was  trying to escape?

She holds me fast

and forces me to think.

The hairs start rising on my nape.

The artist is a master of 3 D.

I’m gripped

by the illusion;

she reaches out to me.

If truth is beauty,

beauty truth,

what hope remains for those of us

who have let go their youth.

The artist leaves behind no name

and yet his work survives by standing here.

Perhaps she paints herself,

and thus lives on for ever more;

or maybe he, in jest,

immortalised his whore.

My vanity requires that I dwell here.

Let me be famous, not an empty skull;

admired by my friends

and everyone who feels my pull.

I see your face.

It shines astonishingly bright.

I see your face is shining

Even in the confines of my dreams at night.

Is this a Goddess that I see before me,

fingering the frame above my head.

Wait.

I do not see myself.

The mirror just reflects the skull instead.

There’s only darkness where there should be light.

The deepest darkness sits

where I  should find the very brightest light.

That can’t be right.

I’m so afraid that truth

will find me light weight on her scales,

I have reflected me within the picture frame.

I truly think that this might work,

if my poor poem fails.

Copyright      nick owen

The Kore Ignores the Deeds of Artemis

         http://www.flickr.com/photos/29320962@N07/8729609336/in/photolist-eipwHN

I'm supposed to stand impassive
while the arch-eyed Artemis wades
in with shins thick as cedars, stops
the gobs of her horn-eared dogs
with giants' heads. I have averted
my gaze for centuries, as stone sweat
drips from big-men's armipts when
the canines sink into their brains,
and as if by reflex, their index
fingers gouge out eyes. My mouth
is stretched into the most artificial
grin I can muster, my hair done
in braids, my nipples perpetually
raised beneath the muslin-alabaster -
and my arm, knocked off long ago
by some clumsy jobsworth, still
proffers an invisible hare. I do it
by staring without pupils, so I
cannot see the moon. Last night,

I dared to look - and as the giants die,
a bead of blood runs down my inner thigh.

Poem by Giles Watson, 2013. Inspired by a fortuitous juxtaposition in the Cast Gallery at the Ashmolean Museum: a group of Korai (women depicted in the height of late-archaic fashion, with brightly-painted clothes, holding out offerings of small animals) from the Athenian Acropolis, stand opposite an extraordinarily visceral cast from the Great Altar at Pergamon, depicting the battle between the Giants and the Gods.