Walking Inside a Grahame Sydney Painting

We drove from Wanaka to Millers Flat yesterday then backtracked to Alexandra and took the road from Omakau through Lauder and Becks to the Pig Route.

That’s all Grahame Sydney country which prompted the choice of this Friday’s poem by Diane Brown. It’s from her collection learning to lie together, published by Godwit, 2004.

Walking Inside a Grahame Sydney Painting

 

That uninterrupted blue, then the mountains, snow

rapidly disappearing on this first real day of summer

and closer, another range, lower and crouching, shadows

draped over brown hides, and in the foreground, fields

wheat-coloured, rolling, legendary as the sky. Inside,

 

the sun stalks the angle of the dormer window, bleaching

clothes thrown not artfully enough on a chair. My lover

and I are writers, after all, and careless of  fabrics and folds.

I tell Grahame I’d use this but I’m not sure how

my poems are usually peopled, crowded with conversations

 

and this view is too large to contain in words.

Upstairs, windows divide the landscape into bite-sized

chunks. Perhaps if I take it one line at a time?

Already I notice I’ve forgotten three power poles

sprouting in the paddocks opposite. Lines I can’t see

 

but can imagine, ushering in the rest of the world.

– Diane Brown –