Barbara Fisher: Three Poems

Grace Cossington Smith’s Interiors

 

How she loved doors!

Her interiors are full of them.

It’s as if her front door has admitted us

to her house and the intimacy

of its rooms with their chests of drawers

and beds and chairs and sewing machine,

prosaic enough one would think,

except that all are suffused with colour.

And in the rooms are open doors

leading to her studio or the big garden

with its lawn and massed trees.

Then there are the wardrobes

with their open doors and mirrors

reflecting the verandah and more garden,

all awash with her signature brushstrokes

of multi-hued pigment

and the dazzle of light.

 

Open doors and open mind:

well-bred church-going spinster,

long-time resident of a genteel Sydney suburb

and early, amazing modernist.

Barbara Fisher

 

Considering Fred Williams’ Landscapes

Odd that we never

really noticed

how our trees look

straggling up a hillside,

ragged against the sky.

Until he showed us.

Farewell Claude and Constable,

Glover and Heysen too,

with your luxury

of form and light and shade,

noble trees and rolling cloud,

shining stream and the glow

of early evening …

No, we are set down

in amorphous scrub

on a scorching summer’s day;

we are drenched in yellow ochre

scattered with what appear

to be random blobs of impasto.

Of course, there is light there

but it seems like

the unforgiving glare of noon.

Yet we could not be

more in this landscape.

Perhaps we’d always known

it in our bones––just needed him

to rip conditioning veils

aside.

Barbara Fisher

Yellow

Vincent did not have

a jaundiced view of yellow.

Consider that yellow self portrait,

not to mention those sunflowers,

that furniture and those fierce

fields of wheat, and a blue night

swirling with yellow stars.

All dripped from his brush.

Nor did those emperors of Cathay

disdain a colour

they made their imperial own.

Oh those coats of yellow silk!

So why I wonder

are cowards considered yellow?

True, we’re used to yellow fever

and once to yellow peril

but I’d rather dwell on yellow pleasures:

butter and eggs and yellow box honey,

wattles in bloom and poplar leaves

strewn on the ground in autumn,

while not forgetting the fin de siècle charms

of the Yellow Book or the wit

and sauce of Sydney’s one-time

Yellow House.

Barbara Fisher