'Some friendly distribution'

 Despite spending three years ostensibly studying English Literature and even graduating with a decent degree, I somehow never came across the word 'ekphrastic' until quite recently. I was glad to find it, as it's a useful word, describing, as it does, poetry written about paintings or other works of art – a category that includes some very fine poems (Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts' to name but one). There is a whole slim volume of ekphrastic poems by R. S. Thomas, Between Here and Now, inspired by French impressionist paintings, and Kay Ryan has written a few. In this one, her subject is not just one Chagall painting but...


Every Painting by Chagall

Every twined groom and bride,
every air fish, smudged Russian,
red horse, yellow chicken, assumes
its position not actually beside
but in some friendly distribution
with a predictable companion.
Every canvas insists on a 
similar looseness, each neck
put to at least two uses. And wings
from some bottomless wing source.
They are pleasure wings of course
since any horse or violinist
may mount the blue
simply by wanting to.
(In freedom, dear things
repeat without tedium.)

Chagall was a painter much given to repeating himself, especially in his later years,  so, up to a point, every painting by Chagall is like every other painting by Chagall. Fair enough, then, to characterise the lot in sixteen short lines. In Ryan's collection Flamingo Watching (1994), 'Every Painting by Chagall' is immediately followed by another evocative Chagall-related poem, this one taking off from the artist's taste for overturning objects. Off go the tables...

The Tables Freed

'The presence of real objects is a nightmare for me. I have always overturned objects. A chair or a table turned upside down gives me peace and satisfaction.' 
– Marc Chagall

A companionable flood can
make things wobble. The
sober table at last enjoys
the bubbles locked in her
grain, straining together
good as Egyptians to shift
the predictable plane.
Dense plates and books
slide off and dive or bloat
but she floats, a legged
boat nosing the helpless
stationaries, the bolted
basin, the metal reliquaries –
in short, the nouns. All over
town tables are bumping
out of doors, negotiating
streets and beginning to
meet at water corners
like packs of mustangs,
blue, red, yellow, stencilled,
enlivened by swells as
wild horses are stretched
liquid and elegant by hills.