Sigmar Polke 1941-2010

Robert Creeley's Autobiography

I can watch, from this window, an insistent height of sky that has been
all this past fall and winter a companion to my being here, and a
subtle, unaggressive information of where, in fact, it is. It's as if I
can't really see ground, but rather, the tops of birches, planted in the
back common ground of this large apartment block, which are on eye
level. One could reach out, with sufficiently long arms, and pick off twigs from their crowns. Elsewise I look across at the other apartment
windows, which are of regular dimensions, set and abstracting, in the flat yellowish-brown stucco. Above there are details of brickwork, the
point where an edge of roof meets another. There are galvanized tin roofs, one painted a barn red, another black, both common colors of
industrial cover paints. And the sky is another thing entirely, persistently, though it is within a set frame, the window, a place, simply up there. It isn't only its being far, or indeterminant, or just
this shifting, massive place of light and weather. It is that it proposes no human convenience, that it isn't simple, that it won't go away. Thus I love Ginsberg's line in Kaddish, "And the sky above, an old blue place."

(thanks DS)

Vancouver Island trees &c.