At an excellent recent poets’ workshop, brilliantly led led by the poet Robert Seatter, one of the exercises was to write in response to a given image. I was handed a copy of Edward Hopper’s 1959 painting ‘An Excursion into Philosophy’ and the poem below is the final outcome of the rough draft I wrote that afternoon.
PLEASE CLICK ON THE ARROW TO HEAR THE POEM
The lapis-lazuli block of bed forms
the sarcophagus of their romance
where she lies exposed,
buttocks negligently bared
but the need for touch
signalled by her left heel
moulding her sun-warmed leg.
Between them the discarded book
open, half-read, ignored,
mirrors the stasis of his neurosis
the loss of sensuality – even
where the tip of his brown shoe
warms on the sunlit carpet.
Light blocks both from open shutters
and the unseen second source.
Cerulean perfection lies outside their perception,
in this linear moment only the self exists.
