1573 c/o Rebecca Perry

Seated Figure of Summer

I know there is only one way it can go
from here, my sitting spot in the shade
with my back to the sinking sun –

these half peach cheeks will shrink and fall
and my brow of grapes will wrinkle to raisins
for the little birds to peck at in twos and threes.

My parsnip fingers, all heavy and wet
will not be able to pinch their wings
and return them to their branches.

This torso of apples and figs will sink back
and blacken like the opening of a cave –
all my colours gone.

Ants will march into me and carry off
the stalks and pips for a new home, elsewhere,
and I will hollow, hollow, hollow.

My corn cob arms and legs will loosen
and fall away like rotten teeth -
the yellow to brown and all my colours gone.

The pears of my heels will soften with each step.
Small brown patches of mush will give way
and I will fall, here or there,

all my colours gone,
with none of a melting snowman’s grace
and some ridiculous final thought.

1572 c/o N. God Savage

 

A Comparative Analysis of the Moustaches

of Tycho Brahe and Edgar Allan Poe

Tycho Brahe
has thick blonde twists
sweeping from philtrum
to well below chin.
Like two sardines
leaping from the neritic brine
of his armpits, and meeting
and kissing
under nose.

Poe can't compete
with his scrawny scribble
like Hitler maybe
but less autocratic
and lopsided
in some of the pictures I have seen.

Their upper lips resonate with this fur
reaching out to each other
across seas
across space
across time.

They meet in purgatory
"Nothing earthly"
but not quite heaven
not yet.

Everything in the night sky means something
remember that.

Every hair on a face can be counted
if you have enough time
and a big enough telescope.

Big enough, say
to detect traces of Gods
in the most delicate
of celestial
pinpricks.

1571 c/o Martin Heavisides

Le mort de la Vierge

Marvellous work by the other Michelangelo, Caravaggio, showing the apostles—St Peter recognizable by his bald spot and beard—about the deathbed of Mary mother of Jesus. Great swoop of red curtain reaching down to them from the high arch of the room, like the spirit of grace (in a dancing mood) stooping to elevate her to her place in the heavens, Regina Caeli. Commissioned for a church which refused the finished work. Why? Two possibilities, not mutually exclusive, occur to me: 1) ‘La Vierge’, laid out at full length , is an exceptionally short woman, almost a dwarf, and has aged with grace but with all the marks of age and little trace of the usual beauty her younger self shows in most renderings of Madonna and Child or even in most Pietas (where she certainly never looks as if she’d aged thirty years since those first snaps of her with the baby—not untypically in fact, she looks younger than her adult son, which is not a common thing in nature. Caravaggio’s decision to age the Virgin like a normal woman was unconventional, and may have struck them as sacrilegious. 2) La Vierge, over the years, has put on a few pounds, which might have been considered a satire on the Church’s accumulation of wealth, possessions and worldly power. (Not that this realistic portrait in any way disparages its subject—whatever may be said of Caravaggio’s notorious homosexuality and (in many people’s view) attendant misogyny. He isn’t stripping dignity from the subject in his version—rather he is recovering dignity for the human body itself, in the natural process of its ageing.)

Maybe the church’s officials had no particular reason for rejecting this admirable Caravaggio; maybe they simply discovered what they had in petty cash wouldn’t cover the bill he presented, were dubious of digging in to any other funds at their disposal, and decided to write off the expenses of composition—or graciously allowed the artist to—and respectfully declined.

1570 c/o Fortunato Salazar

White-spotted

I pound on the southwest gate which feels strangely fluffy. In the dry season these paradoxes enchant and must be our equivalent of chic. I hammer on the spongy fluffy gate. Hammer hammer hammer.

Now CHICKEN, the dirty water cleaned out every day in the mess is connected to the hot sun in the same way that my helplessness to bring you through the gate is connected to the rumors that tomorrow will be more than a little like a bad head cold.

I'm a narcissist who laughs to train the soft and gentle heart of my opponent in passing.

I feel my way home while walking around a lot. I grow tired of standing upright. Ongoing daily fun ends after such a short time. I never sleep, except that now I've gone and done it.

CHICKEN, give way, I'm living it up on your incompetence.

Be very happy if you feel your body temperature thinking of you
and not just who among the temperature difference stopover crew
is the most fuckable in the temperature difference stopover row of cots.

*

I don't feel I'm having complications in my life, but I'd like to flick a switch and transform the hammer hammer hammer into falling shards of glass that will put a hurt here and there in a few broken love triangles.

CHICKEN, I haven't seen you from a great height or while loading my eye drops.

While holding my breath I've forgotten my promises. What are they doing in there, a quasi-finger stress test of tomorrow is a long-awaited shakedown at Echo Valley? Hammer hammer hammer hammer! I'm standing onstage to play my one alone tangled agent, and struggling with myself. I was taught how true it is that to listen is to listen to that which is always listening.

*

CHICKEN, CHICKEN, little repo pigeon, let's hammer hammer or do a night drunk on the beach.

Far away from the image of everyone holding hands to reduce their agitation,
everyone dispiritedly reminded of their strawberry-red aprons,
their short hair cut inaccurately in the dispirited agitation of the dry season,

let's you and I attach ourselves to the strength in your face! When I was little I spent 30 years collecting five cards expressive of such strength of face. Huh? Are you afraid? I'm different than I expected, CHICKEN, CHICKEN, little hometown trout in our net.

*

I feel eyes on me; no, it's only the crude chalk sketch of a blindfolded Annie Lennox.

Why is there no convenient folding escalator, even a stopped convenient folding escalator decorated with a folding yellow sign that reads, Elevator Out of Use, Please Use Escalator?

Hammering, I'm suffering from a greasy sweat flowing from my forehead.

To those I kick in the heart I'm sorry for the damage. I've always been the modest owner of eternal love, but a typical Cancer: there are two sides to every table.

*

Oh CHICKEN, you are shedding floating islands of ice cream in a garden of lost causes.

Gossip tends to jolt people into a rut.
Are you feeling the love that we here are feeling even more than the passage of time?

All we're missing are the white-spotted
chicken part separators to pry apart the black-spotted chicken part separators.

"A woman gave birth to a child who does not speak." So I say it's me. Instead of shouting out the password for the southwest gate, I hammer, hammer, hammer.

1569 c/o Ryan Vance

It could be you

Two oversized cakes sit before the great west gate of St Paul’s Cathedral, which is very much in disrepair. Cracked windows quake under a strong wind, ivy has claimed the entire north face, and the spire still wants repairing. This is only understandable; the Protestants’ll be damned if they’re to foot the bill for Catholic misdemeanours, and the Catholics, well – God wouldn’t have struck it with lightning if he hadn’t wanted it damaged in the first place now, would he? Only one of the two cakes looks to be getting into the spirit of things, sporting as it does a ragged hole from which, four hours earlier, Mary Queen of Scots emerged.

A courtier approaches the other cake. It has been a January day in which the night never abdicated to begin with. While Schrödinger is yet to be born, the principle is largely similar except for the fact that England would not tear itself apart for the sake of a dead cat in a box. The courtier is nervous.

“Do you imagine,” says the cake, sensing his arrival, “things might have been different if, on the scrolls, we had drawn more than simply the silver?”

And then: “It would have been no trouble at all to pose for the royal illustrators, although Mary might have taken some convincing…”

And then still: “Oh, do check on her also, will you?”

Every ticket a winner, every man returning home with bronze or gold, a cup or plate, books or finery, jewellery or delicacy, legal immunity for a day, a week’s loan of a boat, a month rent-free, shares in the royal stock. All to raise funds to restore the realm. Some bought their tickets alone while others pitched in as a group and presumably fought over how to evenly distribute a single gemmed chalice.

FOR TWO LUCKY WINNERS, cry advertisements pasted in shop windows up and down London, EVEN MORE!!!!!!!

Not that it matters now, the crowd long dispersed, but one cannot guess which fate Elizabeth, shivering and bored, may have preferred, a collective effort or one lone proposal.

She quickly understands why the courtier does not check on Mary.

“That Scottish bitch,” says the cake.

1568 c/o Jemima Louise Johnson

Writing is bad for your health

It is dark. Not a dark night of the soul but it is December. There has been too much making merry and the midnight oil must be eaten up also if we are to meet this deadline.

The pen takes its unpredictable skittering path through my words and the cold cannot be ignored with the aches and twinges of age and fatigue. I have been given orders for bed but December is like to be as short as February with all our dancing and dining.

There is yet time and time enough.

After the forgotten grate has met its end and the last of the orange warmth has faded to papery ash, the cold begins to pull at his sleeves and prick him through his winter cloak.

The world shrinks to a halo of sallow darkness punctuated by the bottomless black at the heart of each letter. The hours pass and he might be forgiven for fearful imaginings of rats scratching their way across the work table and sending fresh sensations of sharp, now burning, pain through his body.

A wakeful nightmare. But it is a helpmate of a thought if it keeps me from sleep and from the night time scavengers who would eat my words from inside my own head. The rats cannot be within and yet my heart feels their nips with every breath. I fear I am old and foolhardy but I will have this night, it is mine. There will be time enough.

Dawn comes with icy fingers. The poem draws to its close chased to the finish by the
unforgiving light of morning. This schoolmaster is most defeated; a fleeting shadow, a fleeting dream.

Where is my little Diana; my polyglot princess; the goddess with her gleaming curls of red?

Somewhere from the vantage point of the mind’s eye she might be conjured. She is so swift she might read aloud her gift so that I might judge its merit without further heavy task for these tired eyes.

See the catch in his breath. Not the cough which might have wracked his body but for the preventative constriction of the throat. There is another catch there, around the eyes, a redoubled sighting of the inside corner of his right eyelid. In the pink darkness he has seen his augury and every joint of his fingers slackens in defeat.
Is it finished?

In the half light of a December morning the spattering scratches of the pen could be a tavern bill; his man’s list for the day’s labours; an order of execution. But no; the Latin emerges through the gloom and its robust walls present themselves to the very cold and increasingly clear light of day.

I thought it finished.

But now it seems a hollow perfunctory affair. A poem for the new year for my ten year old queen. A cheap trick for a favourite pupil. Even an old man is permitted his fancies.

Should I make it shorter by the head?

How should a man suppose to flatter a queen who is wedded to her country? Wedded to
her country as I, perhaps, am wedded to this night. I fear that I shall see no more.

The low winter sunlight forces its way through the frosted panes and the window commands that it be opened to let in the golden light of this golden age. The pooling light also offers warmth and touching his hand to cheek and making a cradle of his elbow crook he now closes his eyes against the dazzle and all is orange pink. The orange gleams and fills his head. She turns and there she is – an unearthly fairy child. Her translucent skin laid over the gleaming eyes, out from which the beautiful and fearsome mind could pounce, all fringed with golden lashes. The Virgin Queen.

He wakes to a callous wind from the darkening sky.

He will be found presently and ushered to his bed to sink into the warmth and whatever may come next, it is finished after all.