The Dinner Party - Judy Chicago's Plates and The Woman of Spheres

The Dinner Party. We were there feasting on her life,

as in each plate’s sheen they found some of theirs.

This feast, extends through the gallery walls to dreams

sat at different tables – it is Sappho 46 again,

Judy Chicago’s plate for her so fine, who needs food?

It is Sappho 46, where by the tint of each plate

we are known, and transformed by a little light here,

a little dark there, as desire leaps longing to know

the single woman behind the scene. Untouchable. Vanishing.

At night, ‘The Woman of Spheres’, one of the acrylic paintings

living in the dismantled exhibition of hand me down

1940’s suitcases, wanted to know each Judy Chicago plate,

walking round, leaning in to a name she knew, each leaning out

to her beyond the artist’s impression of a female fleur-de-lille.

An exhibition revealing all life story there to see, breathing

the bleeding colours of ideas, those untouchable, those felt.

7 times she circled, reinventing tradition.

The old curator’s night lamp, the stockroom stairwell

much too dark; the gallery – so still, though still

lit enough for all the movement found in art -

so when she dreams of an empty white dinner dish

back in the comfort of her lodgings, and a crumb,

the potential for corruption, glimmering, and recognised

by Sappho’s plate, she would bless the hours since you were gone.

Her exhibition had been ransacked in the Blitz, crushed, replaced,

by The Sky’s Eye, and other complex maps of town and country,

diagrams retrieved, explaining everything: war trauma,

room for portraiture, three standing on a bridge, train tracks

and curves; a bears cave, abstract art’s blue eye north,

a place to rest; themes connected by a red road,

a yellow brick road, all impressionistic dabs,

1990’s acrylic leaping tactile from the canvas

stacking story worlds, all eventually replaced

by Installation art exhibitions from the Tate Modern,

name tagged burps, a Turner prize – an Oscar nomination,

and so instead, from the suitcase, she chooses to remember

an open-air Huppa’s four corners, an open-air prayer; a father,

a glass napkin-smashed under foot, a celebration like no other,

a Black Christian blessing Rose gave at the wedding, beautiful Grace,

roots curled around each other, embraced, like Chicago’s plates –

nothing but space could separate one from the other,

and by her plate, she; blessing you 'as often

as the hours have been endless while you were gone'

08

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Endless Hours

thank you, my dear

you came and you did
well to come: I needed
you. You have made

love blaze up in
my breast - bless you!
Bless you as often

as the hours have
been endless to me
while you were gone

Sappho
46
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