Poem by George Szirtes responding to Helen Rousseau's drawing

Limit Frame


Nothing is limited, there is only a frame
that is endless and not without character,
such as chequers or diapers or neat folds
and knife creases, such as one finds
on a tablecloth or a pair of pressed trousers,
say, on a gentleman of advancing years
whose last recourse is elegance, because
nothing remains, and nothing is limited.

And, say, you took graph paper, and limited
yourself to forty-five or ninety degrees because
there must, after all, be a rule to govern the years
that remain, and you hitch up your trousers
in a businesslike fashion that nobody finds
peculiar, you discover that everything folds
back on itself, even your undoubted character
which is seeking its own unlimited frame.

So there you stand in your unlimited frame
that nonetheless frames you, with a character
others perceive as character, though the folds
of the skin deepen into a condition one finds
intolerable, tucked into dogtooth-check trousers
of which this ribbon is earnest, and so the years
pile up, folded over like skin, limited because,
something must, at the last count, be limited,

because only the frame can ever be unlimited,
so one, meaning you, is still framed, because
the limit is in you not in the frame, and years
resolve down to this, to years of old trousers,
to several millennia of archaeological finds,
to knife-blades, knife-marks, elegance and knife-folds,
a timescale utterly beyond framing or character
where the only character permitted is that of the frame.
Cloudscape


Look, there are clouds - or is it waves? -
pulsing through a medium, beneath plain paper
and air, something billowing, and, breathe in,
or breathe out, they are still there, those clouds –
or are they waves? – like a gentle washing away
or washing within, such as you feel on the road
in summer when walking down towards the lake
in your head where the grass pulses like water,

and you think of the paper rising through water
within its own frame, the pulp and the lake
and a sieving out, an opening of the road
onto whiteness, that takes you back or further away
into the distance, jostling with the clouds
that are forever inventing images lodged in
vapour and mind, or just on a piece of paper
where even faint shadows resolve into waves,

and here there is nothing but paper unfolding like waves
blown by the air that moves through all paper
that is something you draw on but also draw in,
just as the mind will constantly picture in clouds
a face, a body or land that is further away
that it can imagine, in which the limits of road
meet at infinity or at the nearest unruffled lake,
though there is no such thing as wholly unruffled water,

no character, no years, nothing, only the water
that billows through paper as if it were a lake,
as if elegance was water pretending to be road,
a road on which there is no walking away
only towards the thing on the paper that is like clouds
that cannot be framed because they’re what we’re framed in,
and so depicted, as things are depicted on paper,
steadily mounting like all-but-invisible waves.