A woman who thought she had reason to think • You have come in out of the shadow. • The room is full of conversations. • They are like eyes • They are out here only • They are going naked as day • Goodbye in good time to the body
Source: Bodily Presence: Words, Paintings, by W.H. Oliver and Anne Munz. Wellington: BlackBerry Press, 1993
Electronic source: Bodily Presence: a TEI-conformant transcription
All poems © W. H. Oliver
The room is full of conversations.
It is not clear who is looking
and who is being looked at,
nor, unambiguously, that
there is anyone here at all, not
where you would most expect them
and not all the time.
Perhaps, before the hesitant
shadows drew slowly apart
there was only a burnished black
alive with its own light
from which these luminous
bodies emerge and into which
they are always about to go back.
Two figures with ancestral Venuses