Above mantelpieces, year after year,
though walls or wallpapers
or views from closed windows
altered, it stayed there
--blue ranged hills, the sky.
Achingly various stubble directions
avoiding monotony, striated surfaces
captured me early, a stay against absence,
my own from those places
to which I had just had to say goodbye.
That blue's not right, my father said
and I saw through the glass
no relief of paint touches, impasto
or shading in its true colours.
and must have wondered why
the painter himself made
his marks against nothingness--
hayrick, bean trellis,
blue cart, farm outbuilding; this was what stayed,
the man in a foreground of cornstalks waist high.
Bought with donations when I was not four,
a Thank you on leaving, it's why your home
would not be home without that picture
which still gets the best of time,
a self continued, tempting me to try
because my unfixed life was your removals:
now you've come to leave again,
place it in a good light
over a fire grate, and, after upheavals,
it startles the distanced, the returning eye.
Peter Robinson
Liverpool Accents: Seven Poets and a City (1996
