A Painting by Allen Fisher & Two Poems by Kenneth Irby

Allen Fisher: Frenzy & Self-Control, second series after Blake’s Newton #3, 2013
ink, graphite and watercolour on paper
66 x 77 cm (26 x 30”)

This painting is exhibited right now at:
Hereford Magna Carta and Forest Law
Local artists responding to the legacy.
Wednesday, 3rd May to 10th June
Apple Store Gallery, 1 Rockfield Rd, Hereford HR1 2UA

KENNETH IRBY:

TWO EXERCISES
for Bob Creeley

“Saturday Night”

Everything matters
in suddenly finding what it is
to be alive–that completeness.

It is not only the ecst asy of flesh
opened
or the touch
of earth–

but at each moment
what soars
at us.

As on t his bare mesa
I turn to escape
the terrible intensity of a party

& run smack
against the mountains,

& the ingredients
of the moment
loom up as the only things
I know.

*

“Sunday Afternoon”

Across this sunlight
almost gone from the afternoon

the same people as my body
walked all the hundreds of years ago
they lived (were)*. Into this earth
they came,

and still are alone
against it. How can I say

anything except myself myself
alone? & yet that

the ageless turn
of this sunlight. The footsteps

impossible to forget, the people
that might have been here

God, the love, the love
missing from everything I do.

____________________

Thanks to Bill Summers who posted these poems in a comment to a November 2014 Irby post you can read here. Bill writes:

“1 Oct — 23 Nov  1961  from a letter Ken wrote me //      (were) * penciled insertion into his typed poem”

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