The Sick Child

Edvard Munch (fourth version), Tate Modern

1

Perforated into a certainty
of symptoms, coughs, the only pink

her eyelids, she’s gazing at the light,
hitched upright in a chair to ease

the beak-pecked bird-lungs. Her hand’s all
heat, violet, relieved of the difficulty of fingers.

The mother’s shucked from her spine by grief,
a doll flopped down in the execution

of prayer, under its fall of black – perhaps
comforted there, or scrabbling to recover

composure. The white is harried into life
behind, a migraine of much-too-bright

from the starched comber of the pillow
thicker than her skull, with its face turned

to a window we can never see, out
of frame: visitors with nothing to say.

2

The kept air’s hardly stirred, despite the curtain
drifting into shot. It is all blame

composed in blocks. It is sorrow
in splurge and clots. My Sophie, my sister!

we can hear it scream. Almost.
The sternness grating on despair.

With bated breath, through the desperate
ghostings of the palette-knife

like poor reception in a poky room
I wait for her to move,

unfix from sweat and hair-loss, serene
as in Oslo in ’eighty-two, when I

fell for her in the hushed museum.
This is true. I was like that then:

I could look at a painting and feel
shaped by it, grain upon grain,

a dune in its seawind. I had nothing
hard in me, or knotted, yet.

Now it’s nearer to the juddery blur
of a home movie watched after years,

reckless with wear and tramlines:
the stuck-out tongue, the cheeky grin,

her handstands on the lawn in the sun.