The Beautiful Moment
after Toby Penney, visual artist
when a slide of elements might slip
together over the ordinary terrain of
a canvas its cross-hatching its patience when
something emerges from a pounding texture
of parts the multi-voiced scripts
of our lives and starts to happen –
viscerality of palette a thickness
buckling and calling to
touch the language of hands
fabric collaged and echoing
the world like leaves or
a glory of water sparkling under a daffodil
sun where colour is a shorthand
that sketches the possible
the yet to be visualized
curlicued across translucence of skin
the breathing of
this beautiful ephemera
origins of malice
This story keeps playing over –
a troublesome fairy not invited to a christening
a whole palace paralysed with suffering:
easy enough to think of her in classic pose
far from the conversations and the mirth
the clink of glasses the fêted child
stewing alone this wicked fairy twists
her guts in bitterness sucking on
envy like a jube
the thing she hates the most is the visibility
of other people’s happiness the shadow it casts
is intolerable bile in the mouth
harder to see the dark thing she’s gripping
humid and rattling
under that sweep of cloak
something stunted and uncherished
fear’s
relentless footsteps down a corrido panting of powerlessness
1. In the various versions of the Sleeping Beauty/Briar Rose story (from Perrault, Grimm brothers, Anne Sexton to Disney), there is an uninvited and disruptive guest at the christening of the precious child, one whose ‘gift’ is poisonous rather than life-giving. The damage which this ‘wicked fairy godmother’ inflicts can only ever partially be counteracted by the goodwill of others; malice plays for high stakes, given that its engine is intolerable suffering.
the insidious voice in her head
spoil it for someone else
it’s the only gift you have
don’t look behind you’ll
always be sorry
Poetry and Breathing
for Anne Elvey
In the end maybe every poem is
about breathing
about re-inscribing
the certainty
for now at least
of rise
and fall
this anchor
in wild waters and calm
the unbearable simplicity of
in
and
out
the cool air I invite into the habitation of my body
its invisible conduits
the welcome tide of bright blood and spark
of neuron
that searches me out
washing me in the salty pathways of life
the warmed breath that flows from me
back into the world
I am its creature
A body swimming in air
the steady and the variable beating of
words and white
spaces
words to pulse out an interplay of
note
and rest
ornament and pause while always
the deep current of silence
its possibilities of disruption to
splinter the sheen of surface
Today, although it’s only June
spring air came rushing in the window – warm and faintly fragrant and tapping at my heart’s slow seed-pod – at least it did in the early afternoon, that brief and grassy field of possibility where growing things still reach upwards in the sun –
a turning, a reminder –
before chill seeps in again around the edges in a tumble of greying clouds, crisping leaves, glass that’s cold to touch – so that it’s time to re-fasten the window and gather myself back in, folded and close through these interior landscapes, the roiling of this unexpected season.
