Dead-headed queen
crownless in a devastation of hay
inflorescence grounded
thick timber uprooted
your fibrous globes
from fresh leaves
cut loose from glaucous leaves
Wisdom’s rattling weight
Weight of bract and choke
cast down
overthrown by cultivation
sacrificed as life-blood
for budding usurpers
Your fallen head
Coarse crown disguarded
tragically close
mulching in nettles
watched by the spinney greenery
of the next generation
of your thistley children
Dead-headed
crownless in a devastation of hay
endeavour decapitated
thick timber uprooted
from fresh leaves
Wisdom’s rattling weight
cast down for budding usurpers
Your fallen head
tragically close
mulching in nettles
watched by the spinney greenery
of the next generation
They both knew it was wrong
but in the warm kiss
of a coming summer
it had to happen
The garden was empty
their clans briefly absent
only magpies kept sentinel
and pride dazzled them heedless
Two notes of
incongruent tongues
and it was decided
Now is the moment
The rook and the pigeon
left the garden
flew over basking roof-tiles
and went out into the world
I’ve been inspired to try a little experiment after a recent visit to a Frank Auerbach retrospective. Auerbach famously revisits the same subject matter time and again in his visual artwork. He draws, sculpts and paints the same models over the course of decades, he paints the same city views dozens, if not hundreds, of times over. In particular, he paints Camden (London). Even more specifically, he paints the view from his Camden studio, looking out over across rooftops of Mornington Crescent and towards what was once a cigar factory, but is now Greater London House.
The repeated return, especially to his studio window view, captured my imagination. It’s partly because it’s a scene I’ve seen from a different angle. I used to work in Greater London House, back in the days when I smoked like a chimney but refused to by fags. Every time I’d managed to nick one from Erica (sorry Rica!) we’d go out and smoke on the very spot Auerbach captures in so many of his works.
Seeing Auerbach’s depiction of colour and space, his interpretation of a place I occupied as part of my daily working life got me thinking about how much I don’t see when I enter the ‘work’ part of my day. But this is also part of Auerbach’s regular working day – he visits this view countless times, over decades, and yet, each time he describes it in paint, it is never the same. The light, the colour, the relationships of shape and space change even if nothing else has. And then, in the practice of revisiting this scene across months, years, decades, his work traces changes that in themselves mean very little but placed in the context of a wider series gain a shimmer of significance. A post box that seems to disappear. A shape that might be an aerial appearing on a rooftop. Small things that suddenly seem important as part of a bigger work.
It’s not something I’ve ever tried, depicting the same place at different moments. Or I thought I hadn’t, but I realised the other day I’ve sort of stumbled into trying it since spring has made it warm enough for me to eat lunch outside. When the weather is nice enough, this is where I go:
It’s a closed-in garden, surrounded by the building on all sides. It’s pretty wild, and quiet and sitting there, in the sun, listening to the birds, I’ve been inspired to scribble a few poems, all drawn from this spot. So while it’s not quite Auerbach’s repeated depiction of the same scene, I’m telling something that comes from experiencing this place in a particular moment.
I thought I’d turn it into a little experiment, across the next two months. A poem a week, from the bench. Good, bad, ugly, rough and ready, it doesn’t matter. They’re getting written and then I’ll see what I’ve got at the end.
Never seen the waves so high
eating at the pebbled shore
sinking salty teeth down
and pulling, heaving
the haplessly loose out and away
Gulls mass, those little anarchists
stringless kites in the roar
unflapping in their pursuit
of risky but effortless air
and I’m standing here
I am standing here
planting my feet in sea-licked stones
to become a place
where the wind and the water
and the rattling land meet
Into the heck
of my day-dream driven march
breaks this pigeon leg,
lying in the middle of the alleyway.
This livid-pink scaled foot,
camply poised, missing a counter-part
but counter-pointed by a gristly fan
of tendons, shredded body-meat, exposed bone.
Blood and feathers give me pause,
a moment with this residue of a bird,
a smear of a fantasy of flight
and the lost blue of possibility.
Amputated, grounded, wingless,
It’s just another addition
to the shit and wrappers
flapping in the alley.
I think this is where I will lay us down
so I can carry on into my day
unburdened.
(for my father)
We saw the first wave coming,
standing together on the shore of my changing life,
and knew you would have to leave me soon.
As the wave’s shadow lengthened,
You said ‘I wish I could save you from all this’
before we even knew what all this would be.
Well, I’m in it now and the waves keep coming.
But as you keep watch from the distance of your life,
know that in the brief moments between surges,
your words are anchors in a tsunamic world,
Saving me from all that lies beyond the stability of land
even as my fragile world is swept away.
I will meet you again, but on an altered shore.
The truth had been haunting your tongue
for so long, it silenced you.
Your shifting perspective cotton-woolled your mouth,
padding you out into muteness.
All our talk of the future
were my words, echoing off a room
you’d already left.
Your lyrics to our love
were all written
in the past tense.
You stood and listened
until I couldn’t breathe for trying,
so could you leave
with the fewest words possible.
I wish I’d noticed the slips.
The shock of the yellow,
the tug of the chalazae unfurling
and dropping away from me like a stone,
under the pressure of uninvited breath.
A baptism in lutein-stained albumen
forecloses convention.
Candle me now and see only space;
My destiny has slipped beyond me.
Hollowed, I am free-range.
‘Ink and skin, human remains and preserved specimen, museum object and trace of subjective memory: all of these descriptions cohere around and within the Wellcome tattooed skins’
Gemma Angel, ‘A Movement of the Soul’
Snake eyes
one pip on each die
the dog throw
A cur’s tag
inked on leathery-bark
to mark a crawled life
Even after death,
the gambler’s loss
is the collector’s gain
Skin inside scales
eyes forever open
in the dark body of a snake-skin box.
stuttering culture[s]
Accessible. Approachable. Astonishing.
S. Hunter Nisbet's Website, Updated At Least Once a Week
the literary asylum
My Basket of Eggs 