Trial by Space:


Mount Sinai and Mourning Lace.
Centre stone,
Pendulum,
Down, down, down.
Think, imagine, centre
Concentrate, reach, reach out.

I am standing in a room.
It is a physical room.
It is a remembered room.
In this room is a life-times worth
of memory – not mine.

Striped silk bustle skirt, pink kid dance slippers, fans with petals missing.
Petticoats, bloomers, chemises, camisoles, gloves, bags,
top hats, cloaks, boaters, and beaver furs.

Draws of mourning lace, cards of buttons,
reams of tapestry wool and embroidery threads in rainbows of colour.
Fountain pens from the 1940’s,
fencing foils, tankards, Kafka novels,
portraits of Louis Armstrong.
Each object shouts for attention and significance.

Yet as I stand in the only space there is
a small corner next to a four-foot crucifix
in the room,
it is empty
and it is dark.

Dillon’s room was also dark and memory bound.
His thoughts have shifted and sifted and sorted themselves into chapters.
But mine are still out to sea.

Still looking from on board the good ship Hamnavoe
towards an enveloping
Fog bank.
Like smothering grief, it moves
over me imperceptibly
covering, obscuring, changing outlines
and landmarks, erasing the compass
until I am submerged.

And although I know my feet
stand planted on deck
and I hear the ships engine grinding on
And on; there is no feeling of
forward motion,
nothing to indicate progress through the water.
The fog covers all.

Floating clouds how vast, how vast.
How you deaden with white light.
How you deafen with density.
How you change the context of
the topography
with veils of water.

And you clouds of the sky O bless the Lord.
and you wives and daughters
Sing from within the heart of the mists
covered by the covering vapour.
As Moses on Sinai.
The journey to the mountain is many miles
from the sea and the boat.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Collect Art Publication July 2023

Image
 First published in Collect Arts Summer 2023 edition Stone all the flowers   The year of the art school tutorials. The difficult woman you are to me, and the difficulty I present to you. The year of my recovery and your husband’s death.   Your husband fails and worsens through the days of our trimesters together. As he weakens and declines, I grow incrementally stronger. As if terrible fatalistic scales of balance, set and reset.   Do not cheat her. Give her a full measure of time and experiences with him. Pressed down, shaken together and overflowing. She, in the face of all this decay   Chooses to destroy flowers with stones. Until their purple hearts stained the cartridge with their elemental pigments.   She cuts the flowers only to waste them in the parching sun. It is the cycle of being and unbeing, the grass withers and the flower fades (Isiah 40:8). She decides to press her flowers till their lungs burst on fine co...
Read more
Image
Blackbird Egg Time slows down in the Victorian mirror. She is haunted by every face that checked themselves in the glass. She is on the cusp. A life about to begin in earnest, on the tipping point of adulthood. On the apex of future relationships, sexuality and desire. “Yes” she says, “that’s me in the mirror”, long brown hair, grey-blue eyes. She is just an ordinary brown bird. But common or garden blackbirds create sky eggs, objects of beauty and desire. Each one speckled slightly differently in the genus. If only she can create of herself such an object of yearning, her small brownness will be worth the transformation. On the Hall-stand crafted in a grand antique style, are a collection of blackbird’s eggs. Saved in small glass containers with their lids tight shut. Through the glass she sees pale blue specked eggs, broken with raggedy edges. The armoire ominously overshadows her slight fourteen year old self. Whom she sees reflected back in multiple mirrors, framed in the warm glea...
Read more

Chap Book #3 Gone With The Wind

Image
  Delighted to be published in:-  https://www.cistaarts.com/product-page/chapbook-series-3-gone-with-the-wind Learning craft from the wind   There was once a woman. Who learned craft from wind, art from the sea and design from the earth. She sewed intricate organic patterns in labyrinthine repeats. Her creativity was celebrated through the land. She was known as La Corachine, beautiful shell of the sea. Her daughter Powys was as natural as the elements, precious as comfort and radiant with gold-nature. One day an old woman coloured like an autumn day came to their door. “I want what is yours.” She said, and stuck a pin into the girl, who transformed into a brown-bird and flew off. “Old woman”, cried the mother, please cook a meat and potato pie for us. “Of course”, she sang, catching the brown-bird-daughter. And made her into a pie with potato skins. The leftover bones she threw into a corner of the garden. In three days, a beautiful tree g...
Read more