Long Calder Poems

Translation of Eric Mottram’s Courbet: Elegy 8 by T. Wignesan

Blanches oeuvres ouvertes
résident dans les jours
la surface du banc de travail est noire
les géraniums-lierres
les fougères et les adragans
accumulent leurs oeuvres et jours:
La toile noire de Courbet
un...

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Dear Me…

                             Today my thoughts are about you, only you!
                       ...

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I was born and raised in a little town by the name of Calder
That was just twenty miles south of the Canadian border
As a boy I enjoyed going to school and was doing really well
Mom sang...

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There’s a bluestone building near the Calder, east of Castlemaine,
One hundred yards back off the highway, beyond a tree filled lane. 
For one hundred years this building stood alone at Faraday
serving as the schoolhouse where,...

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Cirque Calder Family

Lonely this
My restless paint blobs
Absorbing precious air
Risking dehydration
Moisture deprived patience
Waiting atop my platform
Resting precariously upon cut wire
And tapered metal sheets
Awaiting tomorrow's work load

Master catnaps
Sprawled beside more wire and metal sheets
While real cat
Possesses Master's...

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Little did I realise when I swung
Into the car park at Calder Glen
That by the end of that week in August 2009
My days of teaching would be over.

It all began so well
Meeting an old colleague...

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We used to go to museums – 
	frequently – 
There were favorite artists:
	Picasso
		Matisse
			Giacometti (especially Giacometti)
	Henry Moore (never passed up a Henry Moore)
		deKooning
			Calder
	Oldenburg
Oh, yes, and Francis Bacon		
		Lucien Freud 
			and Georgia O'Keefe

I could go on, 
	but you...

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Young Mirran lived in Calder wood
all of her spells were for the good
in helping out where e’er she could
But Mirran had a plan
And oft times she would sit and brood
about a mortal man

‘It’s not allowed,’...

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Visited the Whitney*
For the Hoppers – what a treat!
A gathering of works with which
Few artists can compete.

Yet in a separate little room
A different treasure lay – 
A film of “Calder’s Circus”
With its figures on display.

For...

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May mornings turned a blue iris white with the sight of petaled plates on your stubble.

By surprise they appeared as a dawn shadow, thick on a black jaw,
Smelling of Millionaires against your stout chin.

I blinked...

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In a bare field
hidden behind dense brush
There's a spot where people
cunningly come, dumping

their oversized trash.
Somehow word got out
years ago:
    mattresses, appliances, 
 

box springs; just about
anything one could perceive.
I often find myself...

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My distraught, the thought, has lost a battle unforgot. 
I take, I give, the very words I live.
I've done, The sun, outrunning the only one. 

My actions are not my own, a story, I've stitched,...

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