Yves Klein Leaps

from his Blue Epoch (1957) to


 Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) montage photograph 1960,


Yves Klein is no longer satisfied with the layering
of his seductive blue,
the fullness of it in an empty room.
Nor the dance of a naked blued body
that bruises bare canvas.

He is now ready to feel in his blood
the contrariness of blue:
its weightlessness, its bulk;
its come-hither, the sacredness of it.

He aches for a nanosecond of glorious ease.
To shake his fist at gravity, open his arms
to the great blue embrace.
To be buoyed by blue,
lifted and tenderly laid down.

And so, from the high ledge
above an ordinary street in Paris
on an average day,
watched by the forget-me-not sky,
Yves Klein leaps.

Joanne Maybury


Yves Klein blue - Yves Klein (1928-62)


If you have any thoughts about this poem,  Joanne Maybury would be pleased to hear them