I
What is it Braque
would have us see in this
piled-up table-top of his?
One might even take it for
a cliff-side, sky-high
accumulation opening door on door
of space. We do not know
with precision or at a glance
which is space and which is substance,
nor should we yet: the eye must stitch
each half-seen, separate
identity together
in a mind delighted and disordered by
a freshness of the world's own weather.
II
To enter space anew:
To enter a new space
inch by inch and not
the perspective avenue
cutting a swathe through mastered distance
from a viewpoint that is single:
'If you painted nothing but profiles
you would grow to believe
men have only one eye.'
Touch must supply
space with its substance and become
a material of the exploration
as palpable as paint,
in a reciprocation where
things no longer stand
bounded by emptiness: 'I begin,'
he says, 'with the background
that supports the picture
like the foundation of a house.'
III
These layered darknesses
project no image of a mind
in collusion with its spectres:
in this debate
of shadow and illumination fate
does not hang heavily
over an uncertain year
(it is nineteen-twelve) for the eye
leaves fate undone
refusing to travel straitened
by either mood or taken measure:
it must stumble, it must touch
to guess how much of space
for all its wilderness
is both honeycomb and home.
Charles Tomlinson
