Edward Caruso – Canvases

Profile Caruso LEP&W Sept 2021

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2021 Mini Edition

Edward Caruso is based in Melbourne, Australia. He has been published in A Voz Limpia, Australian Multilingual Writing Project, ‘La Bottega della Poesia’ (La Repubblica, Italy), Communion, Meniscus, n-Scribe, Right Now, TEXT, Unusual Work and Well-Known Corners: Poetry on the Move. His second collection of poems, Blue Milonga, was published by Hybrid Publishers in January 2019. In August 2019 he featured on Radio 3CR’s Spoken Word program.

Photograph of Edward Caruso courtesy Alex Skovron.


Canvases

Two bicycles abandoned by a river of glass,
the owners, hand in hand,
gaze at clouds, a song of roses.
Somewhere there’s an older canvas.

Childhood vignettes.
A male face the painter no longer recalls,
his mother closing herself away with him,
two cigarettes side by side.

A white gravel pathway.
An estate’s fields lined by poplars.

He’d work with his brushes and canvases,
the talcum powder voice of his mother’s companion
distanced, as he’d lose himself
in his own landscapes.

Strands of plaited hair,
fine red clothes with folds and lace hems.
The inviting skin of a wife to come.

The world, one of impressions,
different perfumes
and bottles of wine kept
in his mother’s room.

A wisp of hair in a drawer …

His mother’s companions,
he’d take their mantle
with future lovers,
mother long gone.
Those who unearthed the shadow of a man
who could never find himself,
despite the self-portraits he lived with
and the people who sought him out.
They were all outcasts.
His a world of wild rigging
stranded in uncompromising surf.


Vista

From a train window,
rear carriages in view.

Early morning fog,
the Tiber’s elevated bank.

Creepers blanket a solitary elm.

Foliage, silver light.


Trains

Through pastures and towns
barely recognised, but within,
the sun emerges,
also within.

Pines,
the humming of a distant song
and silence of a single voice,
follow, follow.

There isn’t a moment without movement,
seconds that outlast thoughts.
Consolations that open
one’s life, definitions or pages
that have to be rewritten
or abandoned.

If anything is ever
wasted or tossed,
the clear light of a discarded sky,
landscape in bloom,

whatever remains,
lives or horizons,
moments survived
long after their vanishing.


©Edward Caruso