Six Poems after Remedios Varo – Catherine Graham

Seers as Birds or the Quest for Essential Materials

after Remedios Varo

To be a bird from a Varo
painting is to be unlike

other birds. Our vivid
assembly of fine

feathers operates
outside laws you know.

Unity songs from our beaks.
Each note, a synthesis in flight.

Science, nature, art meet
beneath air’s underwing to transmute:

raven, peacock, swan, phoenix.

Hallazgo,1956

after Remedios Varo

It’s flooded here.

Boat’s wake, a turn
with white-tail feathers,
glides with ease.

Prow’s magnetic presence
navigates as bird. Two
of the boat’s three occupants

stare at the light-ringed orb.
What they came for
is not this. The third

figure frantically wheels
the rudder—the boat
won’t stop—the land
juts out—I blow

paint onto the brush
struck surface, leave
my dried airy breath.

All the Minutes Keep Turning Burnt Orange

after Remedios Varo (Sympathy, 1955)

I discover discovery.
Illustrate through gold leaf.

No fiction in the eyes of the solitary.
Cat purrs a message only a watcher understands.

Possibility and chance coincide
where spilt milk electrifies magic.

Sympathy is a cousin and hanging pain
an inclination to an alike between

bodies communicating vibrational energy
charged with spidery constellation.

Minotaur, 1959

after Remedios Varo

Tucked away like a thought,
the thread down my spine’s
a reed. The beginning

of the inside of a question
is how to begin. The key
in my hand, an illusion.

The hole in my shadow
moves the liminal
closer to the elsewhere moon.

This colourless distract
for the day maiden and bright cook
falls like smoke weight

to some detailed place where
your body is at breaking point
troubled into seeing.

Skimming the Real to the Marvelous I Paint to Peel Back Air

after Remedios Varo

A mask of one
makes many.

Subtle like
two songs

from the same
forest bird.

A viewer loses
what’s fresh in plain sight.

Narrative runs the track
in your brain, the frame

around my frame. It has
nothing to do with me.

Letter to a Stranger

after Remedios Varo

I was born a remedy for mother
who was mourning another daughter.
I escaped cities faster than I

escaped my realities. Fell
in love and in love again. Fled
mountains over waters, became

a surrealist émigré. I cast spells
under spells as the planet spins
in service of the lonely. Cat’s meow,

moonglow in a milk cup, home—
a cosmic influence where chance
heats paint and volcanic secretions

spit secrets into my red hair. Solar
systems in the living room: a just-so
leather arm chair, earthenware pitcher,

crocodile skull, diamonded pipe—this quick
beyond into the heart of the egg-like thing—
I rig the best course for cause and effect.

note: for original letter see Paris Review blog 2018.12.14

The Real World and the Dream World Are the Same

For years I’ve been receiving lines of poetry in my dreams. I finally started keeping an open notebook on my bedside table to keep track of these dream lines. During my writing practice, I began working them into my poems. One such line became the title of my ninth book, Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead. While reading Art of the Occult by S. Elizabeth, I was stopped in my tracks by the image “Witch Going to the Sabbath.” Who had created this painting of a redheaded woman holding her familiar, an exotic cat? Her name: Remedios Varo, a Spanish artist who moved to Paris in 1937 to be with the Surrealist community. A few years later, during the German occupation in France, she escaped to live in Mexico City, where she died in 1963. A chance encounter led me to her marvelous. Enchanted, drawn in, I was pulled by her invisible string. That initial spark grew into poem after poem. Lines of poetry that appeared in my dreams intertwined with research on her life and art, her drawings and writings. It all intersected in a creative vortex where, as Remedios believed, the dream world and the real world are the same. Through entanglements with the uncanny, the poems explore the “invisible thread that unites all things.” A collaboration with the otherworldly through the alchemy of image and word, sound and sense, guided me to write these poems. Remedios permitted me to dive deeper into the hidden. My literary imagination was fueled by her visual expressions. With her as my guide we metamorphosed the mystic.

Catherine Graham

Photo (c) Marion Voysey

Catherine Graham’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize and have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and on CBC Radio. Her eighth book, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, Toronto Book Award, and won the Fred Kerner Book Award. Her sixth poetry collection, The Celery Forest, was named a CBC Best Book of the Year. Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected is her ninth book. Her most recent collection, Moon Writing is a collaboration with poet/visual artist Robert Frede Kenter. Forthcoming in 2027 is a new collection of poems on the life and art of Remedios Varo.

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