Leading Lady, by Gareth Robinson

Leading Lady, by Albert Tucker (Australia) 1946. © Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation. Courtesy of Smith & Singer

Leading Lady
​
Frame her, instead, as ancient Egypt,
A magic-irrational, colour cult object
In profile; scan the inverted pyramid
Of her lowered eye, apex embedded
At the bloom of carmine cheekbone,
Eyelid surfaced in lucent limestone
Washed over underpainted hues
Of shadow mauve and tinted blues,
The oval blue-black socket
Pool an oasis source or First Cataract
Where the deep keyed register enacts
Painter’s proofs against the dry plane
Of her face; she’s made up again,
Head pinned back against a column
Of rigid hair. Above, in cadmium
Yellow, the little hat’s jammed down
Like the sphinx’s paw, drawn
As neuralgic hieroglyph or sorcerer’s
Trepanning tool. Is the pain her’s,
Or fashioned as sardonic painterly barbs?
Anyway, it’s her mouth where the sable’s
Lingered most, in red and madder lakes,
In alizarin crimson, in gestural strokes
To emulate the deft control of lipstick
Practice (he saw that many times)
As the brush creates and follows form,
So her lips open and join and firm
Through space and light, a spinning rim,
A raised relief and a canopic jar
To capture and keep some sense of her.

Gareth Robinson

Gareth Robinson's writing life has spanned print and broadcast journalism, mainly in the public sector in Australia, and work as an analyst for a public sector watchdog agency. He's published poems in Australian Book Review, Meanjin, and Cordite. He lives with his family on a narrow coastal strip, on Dharawal land, under the Illawarra escarpment, south of Sydney. Honeyeaters visit the backyard, cormorants hang around out front.