Anam Cara

Woman and Steel

Homage á Susanna Solano,

Painter now working in sculpture

Was it evening in Barcelona, when

you lost the obedience of your hands

to stir the liquids of colour and turn

thirsts of canvas to yellow, blue and green?

Something startled clay alive inside you

to show how roots squeeze earth to hold trees down,

how the water dreams to assemble a stream,

how layers of air breathe off crests of wave

and a skin of green holds a mountain in.

Surface tempts your eye no more, you scrape

a pink granite from your latest still life.

For days you look at nothing but air,

the mother of shape who loans breath to thought,

skin to clay and withers colour to grey.

As the hole deepens, the echoes dry up.

You despair of the form that closes

the painted space, a picture near a wall;

urgently, you reach for metal and steel

to shape desperate cages for the air.