Three After Franz Marc, by Raymond Garfoot

Franz Marc Museum. Stefan Oemisch, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The Blue Rider Felled
  
            2011, at Kochl, Bavaria.
 
Franz Marc, 
my eyes cantered with your blue horses 
over peaceful Alpine meadows
in your gallery at Bavarian Kochl
before I leaped upstairs for your later art,
where bright colours dissolved into abstraction,
Futurist shards piercing and purifying reality
mechanising animal dreams of blue horses 
until you were called away to ride warhorses
destroying  the old world of greed and empire,
but your exhibition was unfinished,
your brushes stayed,  
when your war took all with it, 
dissolution of your bright coloured world.
 
            1965, at Verdun, France.
 
I once saw your purple hills of Verdun,
their forests uniformly immature
like stubble bearding the rough face of old battle,
where bayonets parried by your comrades’ bones
were still jutting from hardened mud.
 
            1916, at Verdun, France.
 
I imagine a dredged wilderness of ashen battle lines
where you were not supposed to be,
forgotten by war’s bureaucracy,
halfway to the city where you’d once copied art
in Parisian galleries and dined with the great,
when a vagrant shard shattered your skull
before your discharge note could arrive, delayed.
 
           2011, at Kochl, Bavaria.
 
Canvases you should have had time to paint
for a higher floor above your gallery
are discarnate in abstract non-existence. 
The only horses I imagine galloping
over the invisible meadows of your intention
are the four snorting steeds of the Apocalypse.

**

Author's note: "In 1965, I visited the Great War battlefield of Verdun where the Expressionist artist Franz Marc was killed in 1916, and in 2011 I visited his Blaue Reiter [Blue Rider] gallery at Kochl in Bavaria."   

Blue Horse 1, by Franz Marc (Germany) 1911

    Blaues Pferd 1 (Blue Horse 1) 

    Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.
  
    Is this a foal’s own life plan,
    floating strong and free
    from wild brutal earth,  
    turning from clawing plants
    to eye the purest grass,
    strong and free in soulful blue,
    enlightened heart and mind
    banishing shadow to its perimeter,
    ahead of the possibility 
    of yellow serenity, rising steps 
    of multicoloured evolution
    to blue spiritual summits
    under the joyful orange cosmos, 
    or a self-portrait as a horse?
 

Dreaming Horse, by Franz Marc (Germany) 1913

Traumendes Pferd (Dreaming Horse)

Solomon R. Guggenheim  Museum, New York
 
A foal dreaming into consciousness
awkwardly on a bench of angular suffering,
red and black, the vision spiralling blue and free
into a sealed world of bundled experiences,
makes a shaft of green heartfelt hope
rise beyond the bounds of imagination,
while its sleeping head greens the bench,
having found peace in a hard world.

​Raymond Garfoot

​Raymond Garfoot: "I am a retired Methodist Church minister living with my wife Ingrid in Peterborough UK. I have degrees in Geography at Oriel College Oxford, and theology attached to Fitzwilliam College Cambridge.  I have written many poems over the years and feel that now is the time to try to publish them. My other projects include research into Jesus’ life and spirituality as well as writing about family history, and I am also interested in music and art."
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