angle of the sun

A yellow gleam bends walls open
inside replenishes its fruit
a quiet exhaling slips through day.

Breadth of flowers – welcome! extend!
Sun shapes the ordinary, an open drawer.
The long silence perfects blue walls.

Or in afternoon’s lateness, light of
a day’s weight, and instant, encircles
the near motionless, books half hidden.

Intercept shape! catching that can.
Forms steep and soften, green and white
in the window’s presence, brush flowers
as though they are slow, erasure

is never complete, curves are wild props
and what is collected, never still …


- after ‘Chinese Screen and Yellow Room’, Margaret Olley

One of the poems I read out at the S.H. Ervin Gallery reading on Sunday.

The painting is in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW so I assume that, once this exhibition tour finishes (I think it is going now to Brisbane), it will be back at AGNSW.

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