Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Paré, Arleen, author
The girls with stone faces / Arleen Paré.
Poems.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77131-464-0 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-77131-466-4 (PDF).—
ISBN 978-1-77131-465-7 (EPUB)
I. Title.
PS8631.A7425G57 2017 C811'.6 C2017-902789-1
C2017-902790-5
Copyright © Arleen Paré, 2017
We acknowledge the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.
The author photo was taken by Ryan Rock.
The cover image is by Robert Joseph Flaherty, courtesy of the AGO,
Portrait of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle [Church Street, Toronto], 1914; bromide print (altered with blue tone), 21 × 16.2 cm, 86/116; Gift of the Estates of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, 1983
Design and layout by Marijke Friesen.
Brick Books
431 Boler Road, Box 20081
London, Ontario N6K 4G6
www.brickbooks.ca
For my own dear lifelong companion, Chris Fox
And poetry can also be sculpture,
or at least more like sculpture than it’s like conversation.
—Michael Redhill
Florence Wyle and Frances Loring met in 1906 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Florence was twenty-six; Frances nineteen. Both women were deeply in love—with clay. They became close friends immediately. That first meeting they always described as a “click” experience. For almost sixty years, they lived their day-to-day lives, sculpted their neo-classical sculpture, made their living, and built their reputations as prominent Canadian sculptors—together. For most of this time, they lived and worked in a deconsecrated church. They were pivotal in the Toronto art community and were founding members of important national art organizations. Known as “The Girls,” their friends included A. Y. Jackson, Fred Varley, Arthur Lismer, and Emma Goldman. Their sculpture is displayed in public art galleries, in parks, on buildings, and on Parliament Hill. They died in 1968 in a nursing home within three weeks of each other and one floor apart.
First Rooms and . . .
Heart’s Arrow
on the ceiling the Sistine Chapel
that tap fingertip zap
that divine big bang iconic connection
communion
by which I mean
art’s arrow flies in one direction
you don’t change art
it changes you
Arrested Motion: Art, Life
I
as in Discobolus the discus thrower levering his right arm elbow up on an intake of breath the continuous now
II
as in the woman on her way to the store before dinner caught in a downpour her sweater now cobra’d over her hair half pound of ground on the list in her purse three potatoes and one tin of peas stopped in her rush by the sudden red light her diagonalled body halted midstep while the purse on her shoulder contrapuntals ahead
III
as in the lava that day in Pompeii leaping into the town into atriums and vestibulums and the man petrified now the man about to be stilled reaching in for a piece of fruit in the bowl the bowl being celadon rimmed with black birds lifting in flight and the fruit five purple-green figs turning to stone as the man fingers splayed hand
Frances and the Red Velvet Cape
Before velvet: free. Angular free. One hand
tracked only the other
through inside passages of pink granite.
None else could appeal. Before velvet,
tweed. A jacket in wool, the pattern brown-twigged,
regular, knowing the next day will bring the day after.
Worsted always snagged on nail heads and rasps,
unravelled, a line, the hem of a sleeve.
At what cost?
Before velvet she knew little
of cost.
And serge—whenever she knelt to shape clay into toes—
did not soften the press on her knees.