Two Poems by Tamar Yoseloff

Suite for Two in Space and Time

for John Cage and Merce Cunningham

This is where they meet, in the gap between backs –
one body unarching, bringing the other

draped across him like a cape
to his feet, so both are standing but not facing.

Please kiss whatever part of you
you can reach for me Cage wrote to Merce

and Merce could reach many places, his body bending
space, his lasso limbs catching light.

They meet at the point of chance,
measuring breath in relation to the air between them;

the ball of a body unfurling is beautiful.
A body lying still is too

although even in rest, breath
is rising and falling. I’m looking forward

to seeing you again rather than backward
to having seen you recently Cage wrote to Merce

and their lives rewind, bodies held in pose
on a spotlit stage.

Words can’t stand in for the act of looking
in a mirror where the other was once reflected;

I’m unsentimental Cage wrote to Merce
but really he wasn’t.

The painter in his prime

im Léon Spilliaert, 1881–1946
(for Sean O’Brien)

The painter has been dead more years
than he lived, which suits his disposition;
he found the corpse within when young

and carried it through brooding boulevards
until it was dark enough to begin
then he climbed inside the night,

the city his sick bed, its patients turned out
to wander under sulphurous lamps,
mourners at their own wakes.

A couple of wars, an epidemic; he’s seen it all,
his bulbous eye like a periscope
rising from a dim sea.

Tamar Yoseloff’s sixth collection is The Black Place (Seren, 2019). She’s also the author of Formerly (with photographs by Vici MacDonald), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and collaborative editions with artists Linda Karshan and Charlotte Harker respectively. She’s a lecturer on the Poetry School / Newcastle University MA in Writing Poetry.