Each month, we publish an original poem, written in response to a work of contemporary art. This month, Lucy Mercer chose Art d’Ameublement (2011–24) by Mika Tajima.
In painting, sculpture and spatial intervention, Tajima’s work is concerned with sensory experience: how to influence, interpret and investigate it. Her Art d’Ameublement paintings – titled after Erik Satie’s 1917 ‘furniture music’, a precursor to ambient music – are each subtitled with a geographic location. Their blend of colours look like pleasing mood-tones in the abstract, but look longer (and in relation to their assigned locale) and they take on a more toxic, artificial tone. In each work, spray paint condenses on the underside of a thin layer of transparent acrylic stretched across the frame, as if the pigments have been preserved or trapped in amber.
art d’ameublement
after Mika Tajima
When the island
appeared to me
it was a beautiful
one, one I could
not think in, like
how the fluorescent
sunset in Phoenix
closed over
American hawks,
motorways, saguaro
cactuses, filmers,
me, dust, uber
drivers, even the
investment firms,
all things dragged
into equity into
a warm unbroken
darkness by the
pink, orange trails
of spectacle –
echoes of fire-lit
forests, bombs,
on the hotel tele-
vision. I was not
in time and
those nights with
the window open
I slept like the dead,
who do not want
to be woken, as
restaurant awnings
sprayed diners with
mist. Satie played
a refrain again
and again
to similar affect –
came order, closure
of the refraction
that separates
citizenry from
the wealthy, this on–
and on– muzak,
screen over knowledge
so we may be free
of ourselves, like
a palm over
the eye, counter-
factual yes, but
better to be the sur-
veilled than surveiller?
Entertainment glows,
any mood
or light will do
especially evening –
Whitman’s moonlight
that covers violence
like a silver cloth,
for the surveyor?
Then it was winter.
I saw the surface
of the work, of
all our work, is s-
prayed with some-
thing that
reverses, a
forbidden move-
ment, spectre
exiting the sad lamp,
like you, you –
the forbidden transition
in poetry, slow emiss-
ion of light coming
backwards, back to
itself like a dream.
Counterglow of
heterogeneity –
you of you,
you unknown,
also you of me,
but never at once?
You wanted to send
money to your friend
at the post office,
it was late… always,
an inference,
faces of internal
light, fissilingual in
the way of aeration.
I wanted to say
bullfinches are small
flames, especially
sunset-like…
don’t you think? I
was a mirror
disporting,
you were nowhere
but particulate.
I said…
…when I was like
the dead I slept in-
to time like a sunset,
moving back in and
out of the room I
went in on the day
I will meet you, by
the gradient window.
Don’t go clos-
ing that thought?
How asymmetric this
silence? And
is not the shared
knowledge of what
has not emerged
somewhat miraculous?
Lucy Mercer’s first collection Emblem (Prototype, 2022) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her nonfiction essay on wax and mortality, Afterlife, is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions.
