The Sage From Seattle, by Roy Exley

Within Itself, by Mark Tobey (USA) 1959

The Sage from Seattle​
(a meditation on Mark Tobey’s painting Within Itself)
 
through the painting
he seemed to say
“i state no fixed way
for time to deny
nor construct focal points
for eyes to deploy or divert 
destroy or decry”
 
the surface seethes and sizzles
my eyes can’t alight there
as they feint and flit  
in a vain attempt to fix
this fidgeting swarm
of demented midges 
whipped by a storm of 
terse graphic tics skimming  
across the restless marks
as swifts on the wing might
swinging their arcs 
from space to space  
through the eye of the sky  
 
the spirit of zen like 
a wraith drifts through  
neither vagrant nor settled
but re-inventing itself
again and again
borne yet unborn
a cosmos subsumed
in this blizzard of forms
 
while as gentle as 
tentative kindnesses
these vestigial moments 
fragile as the gesture
that laid them in paint
are merely nascent events 
that gather tenuously
only to then disperse
pulsed like blown dust
shifting frenetically across
the wild picture plane as
they surface then submerge 
migrate and mutate from 
the void to where we are  
to then flee back again
 
those fleeting glories 
so subsumed in  their silence 
are buoyed by a myriad threads 
a chaos of tangents and tangles 
that weave cryptic signs
for the eye to find and refine
to try to define the sublime
but only in vain and fail
again and again and again

Roy Exley

Roy Exley is a sculptor and freelance art critic based near Bristol, England. He has also been writing poetry for the past thirty years. "I submit this poem partly as a response to Willard Spiegelman, who. in his book How Poets See the World (2005), states, 'Almost no critic has tried to deal with the understandably few poems written about non-representational painting, whether Abstract Expressionist or purely geometric. I have observed that poets prefer paintings of people, landscapes, people within landscapes, or still lifes.'"