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
They are going naked as day
into a dark domain, the place
they inhabited long before
they had shape or gesture or sex.
They have lived through all that.
It is time to give it away
and settle for something less,
even for nothing at all.
The figures of clay and stone
standing around the borders
are here for once coming forward
to fill half the frame ask that.
Is that it? As simple as that?
The black is the house of the womb
where the goddess alive with light
green and white like a bulb
comes from, where she returns?
Figure with ancestral Venuses: green ground