Three poets

De Chirico

after Bruce Bond’s “Oval”

 

Faceless pathos, he said. Heads

huge, smooth, hermetic as eggs.

What I did not before, I saw.

Felt gratitude for his teaching.

 

But then he spoke of the way a child knows her way out

of the wound in another’s body

which moved me too

until I realised the wound was a vagina

 

and the body mine.

Did he conceive me as damaged from the outset?

Is a door a perforation?

Is this window a gap?

 

Not all spaces are empty.

We say love but mean enclosure

we say history but mean injury

you said pleasure but manifest pain.

 

It is hard to communicate

through these wounds on our faces.

My sex takes a sip of the world

and savours it.

                                   – Amy Crutchfield

 

Climatology

    “… cell by cell the coral reef Builds an eternity of grief.”
                    – Alun Lewis, “Song (on seeing dead bodies floating off the Cape)”

 

Did the fury descend, or burst?

Permian Extinction followed the Permian Eruptions;

thus, precedence. I was pretty worried about dying

during this long phase of my life, even

underwater, greatly upsetting the bioluminescence.

As a shrimp, I felt like a little kid.

There were no libraries in the ocean then.

I had to make do with wild hypothesis,

skittering tra-la through the coral reefs

and somehow knowing one day I’d wear

a T-shirt saying, “I Survived the Permian”.

Hundreds of millions of years later, after

all the therapy, after the puddles of dread evaporating

on new-formed land, the question remained:

Had the rage descended or burst? I couldn’t

get the measure of a single thing.

 

Violence set our teeth on edge these million years.

To the extent love felt like flying, or laughter, or stroking

the soft crook of your elbow, for hours,

all degrees of wetness were possible all at once.

We were always inheriting something not our own.

We didn’t need to be here. I didn’t want

to die alone with my blood exploding. But I wasn’t

seeing ways out. Would it be pleasant, thoughts

being shelved in the blood’s final moments,

before each corpuscle, before rain? Over there that dog

is having an uncomplicated experience with the wind.

                                – Luke Davies

Staying in the Bastille

 

It was the end of summer,

I hadn’t been thinking of anyone.

Lunch at Les Deux Magots,

cold melon for dessert.

I couldn’t remember when it last rained

but I remembered every word

of the Cocteau Twins’ “Heaven or Las Vegas”.

Walking the Canal Saint-Martin,

not knowing I was at the edge

of my illness. At Père-Lachaise

a man called me “daughter”

before asking for money.

I gave away the ring I’d worn

since I was nineteen. Yellow gold

set with a fat pigeon’s-blood ruby.

Light wobbled in its laser-cut

jelly. If I’d wanted to end my life

I’d have done it already.

                             – Mindy Gill