Summer Paintings in Europe - Floss M. Jay

Oh – and these are not paintings:

This shoulder of wheaten gold
tumbling across the low hill
susceptible to breeze and wind
as Van Gogh predicted.

And these three brides with their men,
scampering,
festive and naïve,
across the warm cobble-stones,
trailing yards of white lace,
trains of children, friends and strangers
across the dust,
weaving a visible serpent of Romance
through the village
to the wedding feast:

Walking Man by Alberto Giacometti
Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France

these are living within my grasp.

This small metal sculpture
Giacometti made
standing free of the page
in a courtyard,
its thin edges clean
against the light:
it is a man
with attitude
manifesting cautious, poised loss,
it is cold and real
against my skin.

And the girl
framed in the coffee-shop door
reading a book
unaware,
dark cool behind her,
cream hair lighting her shoulders
and the sun bathing the courtyard that divides us:
she is flesh and blood.

At this distance,
home trickles imperceptibly away
taking on a waiting role,
somehow in the wings,
painted on memory-pages.

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Floss M. Jay (Floss Mitchell) (born 1948) South Africa
Source: Peony Moon
from A Drawer Full of Flowers (Selected Poems 1980 – 2010)
(umSinsi Press, 2010)

• The sculpture of Giacometti's Walking Man is possibly the one the poet saw, though not in the Fondation Maeght as she notes she was in the Italian area of Switzerland at the time.