Don't let those black
Full-stops get the better
of what you've got

Cut yourself some slack,
give yourself some shades
of grey

on a wave
that might just take you
beyond the end of the line.

I know this room as well as any prisoner
knows his cell, its harsh white pallor

tingeing the calamine rawness
of my skin infirmary green as pinioned

by his gaze I lie exposed across this
old brass bed, drowned cadaver on

a mortician’s marble slab. Though I give
everything I have, hold nothing back,

he barely sees me. A woman, a dog
for him they’re the same. At night

he breathes in my civet sweetness, by day
I’m an experiment in bald flesh;

nipples, pubic hair, my open thighs
terrain for his palette knife, the sable

brushes discarded on a paint-clotted stool.
Crow-like he picks me clean.

My fan of fallen hair offers no protection
as he strips me bare, peels back my paper skin.

Outside his high windows
Camden is dark with winter rain;

buses, taxis, cyclists
swish through the glistening

mica streets as if there was
somewhere they needed to go.

The Master-Stroke

As Queen Mab’s mad to fly,
the axe must spilt
the hazelnut, loose the brain of its meat,

make the hollow shell a wagon
with butterfly-wing upholstery,
her gilded fly itching at the reins.

You know she’ll burrow
into skulls of dreaming men;
make them ache for shadows?

Of course you do.
And the earth alone is too much.
In Bedlam, i’th cage, there’s still too much:

the Crazy Janes, their shit and squalls,
and just this patch of grass you’ve watched
9 years now - nettle-daisy crowned, God’s spy.

You see the faerie-folk process,
genie-faced and gypsy -
the dandies, tatterdemalions and junketeers,

fay woodsmen, wenches, dragonfly trumpeters,
tinker, tailor, leering satyr -
with their hubble-bubble pipes,

torn uniforms, queer stares,
this teeming life amongst the grubs
advances in its trance, your trance…

Crater

Too much success can ruin you,
I’ve heard it said. Look at my face.
Look at the full-blown moon’s gasp
Of astonishment, her lidless ecstasy
The blind side of renown, the silent
Shelving of attention after the race
Is over and the tribute won.

Her own rites had long cooled
When my flame lit under the sea
And Neptune warmed to my ascent.
It took ages. I’ve watched all kinds
Swim, paddle, flutter, fly, become
No one’s idea of “what was meant
To be”. An idea meant for no one.

Friend, I’m not even here. Or if I am
I’m just your voice in a closed room,
Clamouring against torrential dark
Poured out on a hot moonless night.
That isn’t the home crowd roaring.
It is the rocket-ship, the sound
Of visitors who came and went.

Vulcan has left the building.
Some took self-portrait snaps, flashes
Of scalded time. Others kicked stones,
Looked at survival’s great endeavour
And, unimpressed by dust, turned
Round to find a world behind them,
Glowing, dawning, radiantly lost.

Not Sculture garden, Vulture garden!
That's a Horse and that's a Dog and that's a Dog And a Horse.
The Sky is purple, let's play catch -
Oh! shhh! Does that man want his Nap?

That baby can fly. That baby is Fat.
Where is the Tyrannosaurus Rex?
That Fairy is cuddling that man.
They are having a Kiss because they are Friends.

What is called that lady?
I think she is called Mummy but she is not my mummy.
Ahhh - over here. Here they are - one, two three, and there is Tinky Winky - all the Teletubbies!

That is SameChristopher but it is not my Grampa.
Here is a video but it's not a cartoon.
The lady is cross, but she's not cross with you.
She is cross with that man over there because he wouldn't Share.

These dollies are scared because they are all Broken.
We wouldn't like to go in that room because it's not very friendly.
I think it's a very naughty naughty room.
Ah! We found it! All by myself! The Our Trolley!

Would you like to draw with me?
Would you like to draw a Tyrannosaurus Rex?
Here is purple.
I will do the Sky.

Grand Nucleus 1960-6
Hélio Oiticia

To capture the benevolent sun,
build a new city
aglow with solar possibilities
requires geometric buoyancy
A cosmic leap
Unabashed color
that illuminates the soul
Tropical, topical
A pure jolt of burning yellow
Golden planes of promise
The sunshine samba

The Kiss (after Rodin)

Kiss kiss
Kiss kiss.

Eternity isn’t bliss!
Will we always be stuck like this?

You’re face, my lips, your happy wrist
frozen like a butterfly

where it hurts to twist and
where the white stone pins.

Will it only ever be this?
Isn’t a kiss supposed to end

And then begin?

Queen Elizabeth I circa 1575, Nicholas Hilliard

Our eye should not rest on you, but upon
What is behind you: matters of state,
The machinery of mirrors and ears
By which we put what we will before you.

A face for England, shadowless and flat,
A collar of frost, the black and the gold,
A rose that must never simply be that
And a firebird snared in a grid of pearls.

Painter, paint not what you see, but what we
Will you to see, for we are what we would be:
Not a man, nor a woman; breathless, still;
Composed of imperial geometries.

Garden With Torso II

Am I Alcestis or Electra,
Dido or Eurydice
enchanted into brons,

the bar of my grief lifted,
moving me unmoving
through green brights, green dims?

I'm the pure reduction of a woman
in a garden of forms

dancing where we stand stock-still
amid the applause of foliage,

sisters to those wild petric maidens
who dance forever without stirring

on the high heathland beyond the town,
circled by gorse and krann and salt-woven air –

I'm the tall heartshaped pillar
more articulate than Lot's wife,
speaking through touch,

receiving a daily tribute of hands,
giving back my tactile answers -

All of me that is not figured,
head, limbs,
is drawn into my proud dark core,
where all ripens,

is implicit in the beautiful absences
of limb and head,
my sheernesses leun a ras –
my hollows cupping the light,

my brother, Light, who stays with me so late into the evening,
can't get enough of my bronze poise,

the rooted lowen of my invisible arms
gathering the worthy and the unworthy to my breast –

Electra or Alcestis,
Dido, Eurydice or Everywoman…

Considering Bridget Riley’s Metamorphosis

Here it is, in black and white –
the optic nerve seduced into playing
a blinder. Pressures out of sight
mill all images back to latency,
the mind’s series, treacherous and true.

Yet definitions are at their sharpest
when speeding towards the point where disks
of silver and black throng to the mesh
of something like judgement, then a remix
of tried perceptions, making them new –
as, say, the image of holes in a colander
themselves drained away; or a swarming stream
of fish-eggs; or a geometer’s world
of ciphers somehow unhooked from time,
an eternity made of in betweens.

Now you don’t see it, now you don’t –
the invisible ink which you know is there,
the oxygen of desire, which can’t
be denied; that gasp of mortal love, or
the momentary gift of all its meanings.

Ode to the Walking Woman
after Alberto Giacometti

Sit –
you must be tired
of walking,
of losing yourself
this way:
a bronzed rib
of exhaustion
thinned out
against the dark.
Sit –
there are still things
to believe in;
like civilizations
and birthing
and love.
And ancestors
who move
like silent tributaries
from red-earthed villages
with history cradled
in their mythical arms.
But listen,
what if they swell
through the gates
of your glistening city?
Will you walk down
To the water’s edge,
immerse your feet
so you can feel them
dancing underneath?
Mohenjodaro’s brassy girls
with bangled wrists
and cinnabar lips;
turbaned Harappan mothers
standing wide
on terracotta legs;
egg-breasted Artemis –
Inana, Isthar, Cybele,
clutching
their bounteous hearts
in the unrepentant dark,
crying: Daughter,
where have the granaries
and great baths disappeared?
Won’t you resurrect yourself,
make love to the sky,
reclaim the world.

This sordid plenty, Updike wrote, but look:
the ceiling floats ensilvered, reds and yellows flirt,
the packets gleam, the jack-o-lanterns glare.
No lulling dark, no idle corners here.

Nothing could be more itself, candid and opaque.
The shoppers loiter, sidelined, muzzy wraiths,
and posters range across like sentries:
99c 99c 99c

presiding over the skein of shopping trolleys,
the paper towels, the juicy fruits, the mints;
the smothered cries of admen, some long dead,
chuckles, hearts, tangoes, smuckers, grapehead;

the Latin riffs and proverbs half-deployed:
rolo, nutrageous, zagnut, almond joy.

Coming From Evening Church
after Samuel Palmer, 1830

Suppose we did walk straight out of a stained-glass window,
through the churchyard and up the slope,
an endless gilded procession,
framed by the overarching trees.

Roof, hilltop, spire, a series of echoes.
Leaves printed on the moon
like patterns on a lamp.

We’d be purposeful,
held in the flaring lap of the earth.

Bearded like prophets, tall as saints,
we’d descend to the homesteads,
the ivy as real as we could want it.

And with our children and flowers
we’d keep on walking
in exceptional brilliance,
in the glass certainty of the world.

Spatchcock

As I entered, she had her pinking shears to the backbone,
having dropped the gizzard into the kitchen bin,
and barely looked over her shoulder to see who it was

when I gave the door a little back-heel 
then ferreted round in the fridge for an ice-cold Coors
before slipping up from behind to cop a feel.

Another hot day in September, and that the cause
of her half-baked look, brought on
by lying bare-assed in the garden all afternoon,

a flush coming off her, the veins so close to the skin
I could trace the flow like sap, could tongue-up the ooze
of sweat at the nape of her neck: and this the real

taste of her, like nothing before, like nothing I ever knew. 
You have to go hard at it, either side of the spine,
all the time bearing down against the sinew,

then lift the long bone entire and get both hands
into the cut, knuckle to knuckle, and draw
the carcass apart, and press, till you hear the breastbone crack.

Looked at like that it’s roadkill, flat on its back,
sprung ribcage, legs akimbo, red side up, and sends
a message (you might guess) about life lived in the raw.

So then it’s a matter of taste: herb-butter under the slack
of the breast, perhaps, or a tart marinade,
to flatter and blend, spread thinly and rubbed well in.

She favoured the latter—that and a saltire of thin
skewers driven aslant from thigh to neck, 
which might, indeed, have said something about her mood.

That done, she stripped off, gathering the oils and the balm 
she’d need for however long the thing would take,
and went back to her place in the sun. It did no harm,

I suppose, to watch from an upstairs window: a hawk’s-
eye-view as she lay there timing the turn
(face-up till you tingle, then flip) to brown but not to burn.

The marks of the griddle, the saltire, the subtle flux…
We ate it with lima beans and picked the bones,
after which we took to bed a bottle of bright Sancerre

and I held her down as I’d held her down before,
working her hot-spots with a certain caution and care
as she told me not here…or here…but there…and there.

I left her flat on her back—flat out and shedding a glow,
or so I like to think, as I slipped downstairs
and lifted, from a peg-board beside the hob,

her mother’s (or grandmother’s) longhand note on how 
to spatchcock a chicken, or guinea, or quail, or squab,
or sparrow, even, with emphasis on that ‘crack’;

and lifted, as well, before I lifted the latch,
myrtle, borage, dill, marjoram, tarragon, sumac,
all named and tagged, in a customized cardboard box. 

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.

Cornfield

          after John Nash

Nothing is as it was
in childhood, when we had to learn the names
of objects and colours,

and yet the eye can navigate a field,
loving the way a random stook of corn
is orphaned
          - not by shadows; not by light -

but softly, like the tinder in a children’s
story-book, the stalled world raised to life
around a spark: that tenderness in presence,

pale as the flame a sniper waits to catch
across the yards of razor-wire and ditching;
thin as the light that falls from chapel doors,

so everything, it seems,
is resurrected; 
not for a moment, not in the sway of the now,

but always, 
as the evening we can see
is all the others, all of history:

the man climbing up from the tomb
in a mantle of sulphur,

the struck match whiting his hands
in a blister of light.