Linda M. Walker


From This Daily Practice (for Akira)

He wrote this to me, “it would be interesting to see the paintings that accompany Poems for Painting (Colour) … I like the rhythm of the pieces, but there’s a prevailing abstraction, a lack of concreteness and specificity and detail, that limits involvement by the reader”, and so I’m downhearted, I put the rejection in the kitchen bin, but now I’ve fished it out as a reminder to send him something he might like, something more concrete and specific and detailed, like my downheartedness, which is not so much ‘prevailing’ as pervasive in this night of two degrees, it’s not an abstract night of course, it’s a finely cold winter night, exactly brutal for downheartedness, an old-fashion word, like downcast or boweddown or downinthemouth, in the dumps, that’s for sure, there’s no excuse for writing abstractly, and I am very sorry that he read those poems and I am very sorry his reading them has given me downheartedness and I am very sorry about everything else too that clings to me like dust, like love-affairs, heartbeats and bright glittering lights, it’s a Tuesday night, and downheartedness is useful, solid, and besides what he wrote to me by hand, was a typed message, “Please don’t despair … our judgment is well-schooled, but inevitably subjective”, there you go, (our) I thought, that’s Tuesday, done.

Just calm
 
I open a door 
               and breathe (as urged) 
I am quiet while
               the nun talks
I feed the dog 
               which is crucial 
I read books for 
               magic spells 
and drawings and
               weather like
“cloud turbulence”
               “wind whistles”
“sunbursts”
               “ice on the window”
“air that billows”
               “struck by lightning”

[Quotes from the poems of James Schuyler, Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1988]



openingtowardtheworldnothingelse

to 
begin
so as to 
begin with a 

one 
person view 
of the hills
gladly

and that is the first movement (or instance) 
coming out of the mist wrapped and warm

into the world of bodies beginning at the beginning of matter along borders planted in the past 
and saved and present and time thin as glue with nothing (seen) but there (today) in the curve 
falling from the sky

and the room folds out from the wall with one big window and surfaces shine through dust on the 
ceiling and the tops of door frames and skirting boards and tiny spiders memorise beginnings in 
webs strung from light fittings



Blues

At the dream edge real
waves race to the dunes
a word comes then another
day breaks blue for instance

Curtains tied in a knot
like they were in Paris
six cowries on the shelf
my grandmother’s blue
sugar bowl on the table

In a small blue notebook
ruled faint there’s the only
image left in the world of 
Robert in a scout uniform
born 6 December 1928
died 28 September 1943

A painting called Cloud*

1. A big white cloud leaving the painting will soon be out of view, forgotten, absorbed into the atmosphere; ethereal; darkness lets the shape of ladders through; there’s an old empty wooden boat; there’s a floating man in the dark; there are stars; he’s returning to who know where (into the atmosphere, with the cloud, perhaps); he’s not in reach of the ladders; he’s alone in a strange world; a lonely place where things and thoughts rise and fall; he’s tiny yet distinct.

2. Way down in the back corner of the gallery, behind the hay-cart, is the painting Cloud. It’s a beautiful ethereal painting, where everything is not where it usually is. There’s a big white cloud (dispersing); there’s darkness that lets the shape of ladders through; it’s difficult darkness, not the absence of light so much as depth, an underworld. There’s an old empty boat. There’s a man floating in the dark; the stars don’t quite reach him. This is an agitated, stirred-up place of suffering, visible and invisible; a lonely place of objects and atmospheres and ‘being’ where at any moment an intimacy (conversation) could arise (or detention). Faint screaming leaks across the surface, like a veil, and gathers in the corner where the cloud edges off the canvas.

*A painting by Aldo Iacobelli, 2018



Linda M. Walker is a writer, artist, and independent curator. She used to live in Adelaide, now she lives in Mount Gambier. Trainwreck Press has published a chapbook of her poems, Thresholds. In 2024 Ginninderra Press will publish a book titled Weather Eyes containing her poems and the poems of Jean McArthur.

 
 

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