
by
fillière
Categories: UncategorizedTags: Art, Beauty, Creativity, Insight, Life, Poem, Poetry, Reality, Truth, Writing
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Story of an art piece.

(Somewhere in a northern clime it is snowing and a bell tolls)
The metallic heart
of a care-free child bell-tongues night snow,
resonates / hums / remembers itself
in out-flowing liquid rings, like water remembering
the knife of a dead man’s dive,
an agony, mindless, unnamed.
Though the playful bell tongue tolls ecstasy
melancholy rings the inner ear.
The childlike tongue / heart chimes
and rhymes joy upon the knife-edged night
; upon the knife-edged night a metal-tongued heart
hammers and hums, hammers and hums
: hammers and hums a lyric song
hammers and nails a requiem.

That singular canal evening
of August ’66,
piled high with its references to Ruisdael,
Rembrandt, and Claude Lorraine,
trickled down
from Holland’s summer sky
and settled around us
its light & aromatic amber.


Acrylic on two layers, three surfaces, of plexiglass, 53.5 cm x 62 cm.

Very early in her writing career it was obvious that Margaret Atwood didn’t write from any predisposition to themes even mildly mawkish. Nor were they romantic, sentimental, or nostalgic.
That, along with the titles of her early works, inclined me to think of her as an incomparably fearless and ruthless author with the truths of her tale-telling.
I made this drawing about 1980, quite before the printing of her ferocious “The Handmaid’s Tale”, and by which time she had gathered around her a clutch of early distinguished titles that would secure her place amongst Canadian and international authors.
