Hughes calls him, the shtetl Jew Soutine,
the Lithuanian,
unrelentingly oral.
What could starvation make you expert in?
He secreted paint
like milk from a teat
he never squeezed,
fatted the canvas
with inedible calf.
Take, for instance, the Carcass of Beef, 1925,
slung up in his studio
like a gutted, decapitate christ:
Rembrandt and El Greco
are revivified
in that spiritual meat
as it rotted and stank
what of life it had
into the disgusted neighbourhood.
Sanguinolent, incendiary,
its prone bulk strains
the links which hold it,
hanging with parts apart, splayed
and at the viewer’s mercy — should they
show any mercy —
only the very weight
suffers to question
unredeemed muscle, individual taste,
as if the sheer mass
might pull it free.
Lights will go down each evening
on its carnivorous fire,
its turbo of passion:
even in the dark, subdued,
its meat will glow
a deep, raw crimson.
Meanwhile, our stylish magazines
purvey zeitgeists:
the suppurating reds
à la crapaudine,
are bulwarked in cool interiors,
pleasantly lit —
the elegant
cold stores of museums
dotted with gently moving fronds,
with all the proceedings
noted by gauges
in a crabbed
stenography of ice.
We exit into a day
flushing us with light and a sense of space
and air above us:
the granite pillars,
the diction of frieze and portico
gives way to slurrying traffic,
a sty of horns,
urban dilapidation,
a greyer, less intense perception
which sprawls on buses,
on tubes, in trains,
the endless, cerebral spool
unravelling gradually.
In the next bay, perhaps,
“Agitprop Art of the Soviets” —
their perishable forms,
the ROSTA posters, primary
Image d’Épinal blocks
of colours
stamping out the solids of ideals,
exhortations to
DRINK KAYL’BAKHOVSKY BEER,
or BUY DOBROLET SHARES:
intensely legible on cheap paper,
designs
surviving in frames, precious
last words of a Faktura
for which the people
were the country:
that “art of 5 kopeks”
finds itself expended slowly
courtesy of Lloyds or IBM,
or used freely in quotation
to paper the stairs of the Underground,
as people float past
on carnival escalators.
Evidently Soutine is different:
note though how Cogniat
places his origin
‘near Minsk, in Belorussia’:
oral as Soutine, can we
ingest his provenance so smoothly?
We look at the Dead Fowl’s plenum of feathers,
or the photograph of Soutine
posted by his subject,
a fowl gallowed on wire:
it grows harder to assign
a simple root for this, or fix
more sufficient origins
to such geography of meat.
These are the pigments after all
in which De Kooning remarked
a kind of transfiguration:
ever more separate,
ever less visceral,
we follow his art at one remove,
as we follow everything
with partial apprehension.
Knowing we are on the eve,
we watch as the spirit of the age
arrives, deus ex machina,
borne down English roads
in a cortège of Zils:
pastel, milder, dry,
we watch on Japanese tvs
the contracting of our tighter globes
shrink-wrapped in ozone and kilobytes.
‘And what the image loves, the image leaves.’
As with the new poems, we keep
the core protected, our approaches
oblique: with celluloid digits
we handle things
caressing away the world’s cares
through the icy
gloves of cameras,
boxing them off
as if we might touch on
a dangerous radiation.
Calm, alert,
we breathe a new atmosphere
of glasnost and perestroika,
and feel old Cold Warriors
grow stiff and useless,
hasped to their heavy ideas
like hammers or axeheads.
For the new locution is seeping.
Watch how glibly it moves
from the broached cosmos of an egg
miscarried on the kitchen floor,
how it lifts
sinuously through the open window
into the cool, greening April air,
and the fool of spring:
how suddenly aware we are
the whetstone remains untouched,
that DeLillo’s ‘airborne toxic event’
drifts from consciousness.
Soutine the sensitive child we know
fainted at the ritual flaying of fowls:
scalded, incarnadine,
his canvases rear their brooding forms above us,
lifting their dumb, hulking carcasses
to an altered decay,
recapitulating living.
Even so diminished, the cheap
background reproductions
give off a polluted radiance:
the portraits of page-boys and valets,
his bellhops and waiters
staff the mind with their liveries
of scarlet and burgundy:
these subjects of a lower order
burn uglily, seem fired
by negligent glances —
here the lonely Jew Soutine
fulfills his departed culture,
mutating with lice and limousines
into an artist’s vocation,
infringing on
the prohibition of images.
Downstream of these things
we’re eased in our clinic-like homes
of a diarrhoea of signs:
as yesterday’s news is no news
in Georgia or Azerbaijan,
we rapidly fill the partition
behind which we grow
expert in local crises, local colours:
and there our stories cohere
round solid, legitimate points
like Frege or Gramsci,
or the very definite Acid tincture
to this year’s New Order —
or talk of Kapuskasing and cubanes
(Kapuskasing, Cree, meaning “something like
‘bend in the river’”)
with our guest, Kurt Ungar,
drinking good wine.
Mobile, decentralised, lean,
we learn a new lightness,
a grace over the names
like Buchenwald and Zuccarelli
at home in our personal sycamores
in psittacine ease:
we know survivors die
and were rhythmical
as kelims or Lebanese chests;
we know we survive.
On the eve of smallness as we are,
to think often of those
who were truly great
seems natural.
The style of Soutine is over.
Wry and mature
we keep our living in bounds,
and pity his torment:
his carcass reproductions
lie neat between covers,
kept from the foreground
with Van Gogh and Picasso —
what have we to learn
from any of his
Villette slaughterhouse orders?
We stand in a yew, obituary space
among the slight names
of local churchyards:
among the strimmed stings
of wayward nettles,
in the lulls between
the sweet, piercing calls of birds
we might hear a sound
of distant glaciers calving,
a faint
groan of monoliths breaking up.
Fin-de-siècle again,
we feel the ice melting
and breathe with relief
among minting buds
that the age of Yeats and Nietzsche is over:
moving eerily from genus to species,
to someone’s young daughter
on the eve of May
showing the petals
like albino stigmata
on her palm,
their fragrance
a threshold and
a recurrent dissolution.
Aloof in gardens,
they have a rueful experience
of other upheavals:
sensing the wasteland in their hands,
back-masked by irony,
clever as we are, secure as we are
at distant pressures
holding.
Now as April opens wilder into spring,
the old, crueller propositions
flower into a new leaf,
more various:
everywhere people are stirring —
and old images
are sharpened and brightened up
like gleaming sickles
for a new reaping.
And wherever the wheat listens
to the long, keen breeze
moving through pylons, among rusting tractor parts,
in the Ukraine, or Armagh,
or in Gibraltar,
people feel they’re on the eve,
and glancing suddenly up may find
the wielders of power and welders of a new world.
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