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I could tell you that the woman in the photograph, that

Tanned thin woman holding the hand

On the garden seat beside her had just turned

To the face that isn’t there and leaned in, saying

‘I love you, my darling’, to the nape of his neck, meaning it.

Perhaps I could go on, that her day had been

Full of whispers, full, of those kisses that leave

Lips still parted, just slightly, and aching from too

Much sun, bruised, breathless, smashed by the

Waves and the rolling of their bodies, over, over,

That to be still seemed to her now uncomfortable,

Skin prickling, sticky from the seasalt and sunoil.

The dress trembles at her knee, just picked

Up by the wind, a hot teasing wind that shivered

Along the inside of her thigh, smooth and still pale

As the creamy inside of a shell up to the cotton rim

Of her underwear. She is talking, laughing, her mouth

Neat in the perfectly sweet smile she arranges (to seem

Polite),when really she wants to go back to the hotel,

To the creased white sheets they had left that morning,

To her notebook lying on the divan. She wants to lie, quite

Naked, on the bay window seat looking out to sea, her chin

In the groove of her collarbone and feel the cold stone shelf

Under her cheek, watch him undo each single button

Until he is shirtless, the open slip of his skin shy behind

The white cotton, the buttons of his jeans just ajar and the serious

Strays of hair above the line of elastic, where beneath, he still smells

Of her, tastes of her, a sharp, lemony musk. I can tell you

That beneath the fluttering neckline of her dress, its covered

Loops encase the breasts, fierce, swollen, hardened, the colour

Of warmed milk, of a woman in love. That the careful folding

Of the legs, polite ankle straps of her shoes, the tasteful

Wristwatch deny the heated blood that was beneath, the

Applied powder mist her bruises like smudged berries,

Lasting proof of incisor on flesh. That the dim pain she felt

And remembered as the shutter clicked and she pressed the

Bruises with his fingertips beneath the table, was the sickening

Slam of her back against furniture, hipbones on table,

Shoulder, banister, open palm. I could assume that the

Day was quite suffused with the most delicate pale

Shadow, cobwebbing the world, that she could have

Believed it would all go on forever, quite like that. I

Could tell you, looking at her there, frozen, drenched

In last summer’s light, that she could not have understood

Then that she might be here now,

That the summer and the seconds and the bruises might ebb

Away like the froth of that evening tide, leaving these single

Prints of footsteps in the snow, preserving loneliness.

 

Au Revoir

My mother recently brought a poem to my attention by Baroness Blixen who, suffice to say, has taken my breath away on more than one occasion. She wrote this in Kenya following her divorce from Bror Blixen and it was found amongst her papers after she died. 

Au Revoir

I have wept and said farewell
Thus justly ends our lovers’ duel.
Both our honor was served well.
And to the honor of your soul
I shall remember each old place.
Friend, it was sweet, in any case

Isak Dinesen

Captured,

it was starting to rain which is why my father’s arm is extending

The umbrella over you and why your shoulders are hunched as

Though you had flinched, about to be hit. I am there

Behind you behind a patchwork blanket with these wide eyes

And little girl hair just picked up by the wind, a brown it is not the

Shade of now, the greybrown of a mouse’s back. You had tied

A ribbon in it, navy, the same colour as your shoes, at that party

The last time I saw you, when everyone had drunk too much

And everyone wanted to go to bed with eachother. The sky was swollen

I remember and it was just before my sister came up and said

I won’t kiss you because I might catch it, the moment before I

Cannot see you again because there is too much water in my eyes.

To You (know who you are)

I didn’t exactly ever meet you -

which is to say I was there

and you were there. Borrowed light, is

what I remember, green dress, eastern coast.

You wore a red wishbone

on your wrist, never spoke. Later,

the man who was getting married told me

you were mute, that the locals believed

you had fallen from the sky into the ocean

and been washed up among the dunes

motherless, fatherless, like Icarus I

thought, like a scrap of myth.

In sleep I wait

for you in the cabin on the hill. And when

you come I say ‘you’ll have to forgive me

for not remembering your name’. You look

serious but it doesn’t matter now. It is still

light, like a three am Norwegian light and the

geese flicker over the lake boats, their moorings

tenuous ghostly shapes that shift below the tree-line.

I didn’t expect, when I slept, that you

would be so beautiful under the rickety strung lights,

that being here I would feel no shame,

standing in the distilled dawn, like glass, pale, helping

you with the hoop and splash of sliding nets. Not even the slap

of windbreaker, the driftwood snagging on the beach.

The sudden catch, like love.

Stillness follows the wind, psalm-like,

the map is at our feet, flapping.

We stand on it, rootless, twined together, overlapping,

until the metallic taste of rain pushes me up

through the fever dream, lays me soaking

in real life, in a room with walls – a bedroom, creaking radiators,

my lover saying it’s alright. I can hear

the whistle of your spinnaker ropes, thin and reedy

and you, nameless, speaking at last,

saying ‘there isn’t time. There will never be time, now”.

Man Flu

‘Man Flu is known to be a highly contagious condition and sufferers should not be in contact with other potential carriers. Certain members of the female species do not believe this is the case.’ Quote taken from Wikipedia

Man Flu, otherwise known as a trifling cold, is a very real and potentially very destructive modern phenomenon. I know this because I am living with it – my other half has degenerated into the kind of sniveling germ zone I believe this term refers to. Honestly, one would have thought it was the black death. While I quietly (i.e I cover my mouth when I cough/sneeze) mope at home, minding my own business and generally feeling quite optimistic about the fact that I can get my once-a-winter cold over and done with now, and, I won’t lie, really rather enjoying being tucked up with a hot toddy and a really good book, I am constantly reminded that I am sharing my down time with someone else – someone who is far more unwell than I. I don’t know about other men; it has been a long time since I was this close to anybody in order to share such familiarity (does a bed of snotty tissues, his, count as familiarity?)  so I remind myself that my relationship with this man has reached a stage I can only describe as tender. However. I believe it very possible that we share the same germs seeing as we share the same saliva, the same breathing space and spend more time together than we do with anyone else. So is it possible that those same germs manifest themselves so very differently when their gestation period is at its peak? (As I write, continual sneezing persists in the bedroom. No, not sneezing, roaring. Roaring so that his pain might be apparent not only to myself but to the pedestrians walking by on the pavement and to the occupants of the surrounding houses in our immediate postcode.) Then there’s the sighing, the groaning and the moaning. The two rooms littered with tissues. Not to mention the crying. Ok, so not actual tears, but streaming eyes accompanied by a kind of strangled sobbing- ‘I don’t feel very well’ x 20. I mean, I feel sorry for the guy – honest, I do, it must be awful. Oh yeah, I have it too! (Thanks for reminding me). I have spent the day I set aside for cold recovery hijacked. You see- it’s even rubbing off on me – I feel so hard done by…

The Cannon’s Mouth Poetry Magazine

Think Locally Oxford

Poem for the day…

On the Street of Dripping Branches, by Annie Freud

Imagine you’d fallen asleep on the atlas of the world

and had woken, hours later, thinking of your lover and

all the hot countries you’ll never go to with him,

the afternoon sleep you’ll never wake from together,

the contrast of the colours in the garden,

the village women in their black clothes

watching him walk beside you with a striped bag,

and the shyness you’ll feel when he comes

back to you on the beach after a long swim and

later, on the terrace, reading about falling dictators,

while the sea crashes and the geckos walk across

the ceiling, the sound of a dog barking while you make love

and the way he’d sometimes turn nasty in social situations…

The Mean Reds and Mondays

“Listen…you know those days when you get the mean reds?” –Holly.
“The mean reds? You mean like the blues?” –Fred (Paul).
“No… the blues are because you’re getting fat or because it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?” –Holly.
“Sure.” –Fred (Paul).
“When I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump into a cab and go to Tiffany’s. Calms me down right away.” –Holly.

- From Breakfast at Tiffany’s

An October Monday morning, Oxford. A morning I can only describe as colourless. A day for forward thinking and reminiscing. I woke at seven, rolled onto my left side and announced, to my bleary-eyed boyfriend- ‘It is time to rejoin the world!’. After a summer of denim short-wearing idleness, workfree,  carefree, we roamed European countries (please see Our Summer 2009), ever searching, seeking the next ‘fix’ for our greedy eyes, the next bed, the next hill-top to stop and eat fresh cheese (so much cheese) we have returned home for another British winter. When asked why I have not written sooner, I can only reply ‘I have been too happy.’ But now, with the onslaught of the working week, dark early mornings, too-short afternoons, the growing feebleness of daylight, I fear it is time to return to normality. Enough. So, here I am (in black, it seems only appropriate) before the keyboard once more, to my left a cup of (strong) coffee, to my right a timesheet and the phone with the screen that winks- 9.55AM NO CALLS NO SMS.  Here I am, trading time.

Two or is it three? weeks back into life under the spires, everything in my life seems new- new job, new car, new apartment, new hat (bought on sale at This Shop Rocks on Brick Lane, white rabbit fur and suitably Anna Karenina-ish, appropriate to icy mornings trudging to new job, when new car is boxed in, grrr) and yet, I am haunted by a strange nostalgia for ‘the way things used to be’ – our old neighbourhood, now, lamentably, the other side of town, warm evenings at the coast in Breton stripes, phone calls to my parents, who I have lost to Africa – yes, she has gone with him, FINALLY… (read my mother’s blog at: http://miscellanyfromnaivasha.wordpress.com.The nomads have moved on, once again.) In a bid to banish self-pity and the odd escapee tear for the above, I whisked myself to London town this weekend and sought solace in the company of my sister and the headpieces of Karin Andreasson ( http://www.karinandreassonjewellery.com/ ) which I carried home reverently, wrapped in tissue paper, one a baby blue dyed goose feather and the other a 1950’s creation currently glinting on my dressing table. After recent perusal of Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend, once again, I couldn’t resist, and Swarovski crystals are such a good substitute…  don’t you agree?

Sky and Escapism

On my fifth birthday, I sat on the window-sill in my parent’s cottage in Wiltshire watching clouds scudding fast across the sky. I know this because I have a picture in front of me taken on that day. I had crossed arms and wore patent mary-janes. That was the day I realized I would never be normal. I would stand on my head, to tilt the world the right way up.

Since then I have always looked to the sky to guide me. But it was only when I left Kenya five years ago that I recognized I could never replace the African sky-scape. I realized that wherever I went, nothing could challenge the stretch that my eyes had met there, or the way the clouds hang in front of your nose, the size of the raindrops that fall from them, the heavy orb of red that shocks the mountains on the horizon as the sun slips away below the lip of the earth.

“I had a farm in Africa”, Isak Dinesen, better known as Karen Blixen, wrote in her novel Out of Africa.

I do not have a farm in Africa. I have a tiny two-roomed cottage on somebody else’s farm, nestled on the shores of Lake Naivasha, reached by a dirt track that weaves and chuckles it’s way through the acacias and papyrus. It has a green corrugated iron roof that provides the nightly resting place for a female leopard and beside this, in another but substantially larger dwelling, with a ramshackle verandah riddled with bougainvillea, lives my father.

My father gave up on this country years ago. I think my mother got fed up of his railing at the news broadcasts, the ‘civilized police-state’ he would murmur just audible, the constant surveillance, the yobos on the street vomiting and paralytic. I think what offended him most was the lack of elegance, the lack of magic. I would watch his face crease and crumple picking his way through the savaged streets on sunday mornings, strewn with rubbish, burgers thrown to the ground, trails of blood and used condoms. I think it made him so angry his own inner-glow began to fizzle and spit and slowly die. So one day he left. With a battered satchel and a duffle bag.
Up. Off. Out.

Tonight in Oxford, far from Africa, I will dream of my father; his sweet balding head nodding over The Daily Nation, the pungent wood smoke filling the house, drifting over Naivasha lake down to the shore.

Matinee

Aisle lanterns glow like fireflies.

The world is her oyster,
she swallows it whole.

The sun scrambles below the skyline into mauve
as she places a finger on her lips to no one,
guttural, yellow-throated bird,
inhaling incense and impending rain.

A palate of spice erupts in song
to the wild applause of a butterfly
incessantly dying against the pane.

A fledgling season will come on, it comes on
over the scorched garden, waltzing
down the carpet, rolling itself out,
après l’amour, le repentir

without repentance.

The sky pales hot with embarrassment
gathers it’s mille feuille skirts in frothy puce
and scratches gold into the firmament.
Translucent fairies
choose their steps toward her,
as pinpricks appear in the sands.

In sleep she sees machines
munching reams, spewing headlines
already:
Edith Piaf collapses on stage!
(fallen petals drip rain-drops).

New Poems: African Love Song

The fever trees bloom red blossom

like a flamboyant wound

as they scald the gauzy veil of the afternoon.

 

The nervy nets of trees lacing the horizon

are reflected in scalloped edges of waves

on the myriad of silk-green water,

glowing to life like an ember.

 

I wear the gesture of a silk dress

over a light tan, blow

oyster grey smoke into the papery sky.

 

Above the plumage of doum palm

near the house, the porcelain face

of a distilled moon spits back light

over the whale-bone corsetry of

a stripped carcus, its creamy casing

like the entwined fingers of lovers.

 

In apricot light I survey my country,

kiss the shadows strewn like

discarded clothing

over the Ngong hills with my eyes,

throw myself

over the cliff of longing

to be home in the savannah.

 

 

New Poems: Kamiti Jail, Nairobi

 

As far as people know

I have killed two men.

 

The first time was an accident,

it was so dark that night

in the raid.

 

They said once was forgivable,

in the circumstances.

 

The second time, a year later

I was out with Flash.

We were down-wind of buffalo

their scent smarting the nostrils.

 

When the first arrow whistled past me

I aimed at the dogs.

The poachers scattered with their loot,

limply dripping impala

on their backs.

 

This is where I get confused,

the cell walls are sweating,

I can feel her now.

Smooth varnished wood

cold metal barrel.

Rapid, controlled expansion.

Penetrates thin skin,

light muscle

and bone.


 

I see the widow in the stalls

her eyes lowered.

 

I never saw the white

dog.

 

Some say I shot to kill,

some say I meant to sting

the dog’s arse, but the bullet

found man.

 

Dust skidding under the tyres.

Blood filling the foot-well.

 

I never saw a white dog.

Short Story: A Parisian Affair

 And this is how it has been.

I think of words and him. Wolfish. Swagger. Sinew.

‘Lonely men live like wolves’.

We never kissed really, when I think about it; it was what it was for the sake of it. We saw this as a necessary physical fulfilment. A necessary procedure, like eating. The course of it, our involvement conveniently steered clear of the inconvenience of any emotional, any deeper knowledge of one another.

And so we met, we ate, made love, smoked, and departed punctually, busily, resignedly.

It was a compromise of sorts, between two strangers.

 -       Hello….

-       Hello.

 The usual slightly awkward greeting, which we soon learned to skip altogether.

-Good day?

-Mmm. Work, y’know…. Listen I hope it’s not inconvenient to eat around here, I have a meeting in two hours and there’s a place on the corner..been there before. Not bad omlettes I remember.

-No no of course…

 We walk in silence for a block, listening to our breath, rhythm coinciding, then not.

The Café is more of a Brasserie, divided into old leathery booths. You’ve researched this one, I think. We slide into one away from the window. I drink coffee, my appetites not great. He has the usual, ravenously and without a pause. I wonder if he had breakfast.

Then wish I hadn’t wondered at all.

Wondering is a thought process. A process.

His coffee is luke-warm. He downs it and pays.

 -The rooms not far, nodding to the door.

The room is the same as the others have been; uninviting, pale green, the bed has turned-up covers that seem rudely expecting. They irritate me and I flip them flat. The bathroom is sterile, shiny, embarrassing.

The sheets are always cold so we just get on with it fairly wordlessly. The deed. I laughed once we he asked to make love to me. It doesn’t feel like love.

I bite my lip and he turns his head away. It is a suppressed release. The pillows are borders.

Once he looked down at me, into my eyes, which he never does, and it made my stomach flip. But I looked back fiercely, like a hawk pinned down. He was testing me.

 Afterwards, the same routine.

-Cigarette?

He offers his silver case as though at a dinner party. So reserved and polite.

We sit up, propped against pillows on the headboard.

-Oh, thanks.

I carefully think of the appropriate word. Ceremonial.

We smoke into the room. The smoke hangs in the middle air like low cloud.

A quick departure- he’d always leave first, planting a brisk kiss on my cheek. Between his half-hearted lips and my cheekbone I hear the static. But his mind is on the next pressing matter, and with a quick wave and the flash of a shiny briefcase, he is gone.

I linger. And smoke another cigarette.

As I leave the hotel I enjoy the slightest of looks from the porter. He looks like a penguin in his black and white uniform. I wiggle my hips a little more.

I suppose I enjoy the illicitness of my afternoon soirees. The secrecy, the suspicion. The rarity of having to say so little. I was a mistress I suppose, feeling a little like a whore, but then I deliberately dressed like a housewife. He enjoys that, the pervert. Little floral tea-dresses over virginal silk slips.

I have played my part for the day. Now I leave as me, changed into a black cashmere sweater and cigarette pants with patent spiked peep toe heels. I leave my hair ruffled and distressed and apply a little rouge to my stained lips.

They are satisfactory encounters, these. We both accept the other as sick, and perhaps a little dark, and indulge just enough to keep our subterranean characters alive. The writer in me constricts a little, and licks its forked tongue, coiling down again until later.

I stop by Patisserie Valeries on the way home and buy some sugary glistening sorbet. I enjoy the walk, it is usually dusk, and today the evening smells of autumn.

 

New Poems: Inevitable

 

 

When we met you were married and I was fourteen.

It was a family thing, a picnic on the beach.

Your wife was French and beautiful licking an ice-cream,

her pink tongue darting prettily in and out of her mouth.

I was watching her; you were watching me

pretending to write in the sand, squinting behind ridiculous sunglasses

with my swimsuit riding up my, derriere.

 

She made you move to Paris, I

didn’t see you then for years.

I learnt how to French kiss

and screw and break hearts.

One night you phoned me at school

I curled around the receiver like a kitten

listening to you, drunk

going on about Baudelaire.

 

When I was seventeen we smoked pot together,

you were in tears fiddling with your plim-soles.

That summer, I was silent, unhappy; you

understood. You said

I’m taking you home, this is madness

and you did, the next week

even though you don’t get Africa and

can’t stand the heat;

handed me to my father and

for the first time, he understood.

 

When you told me you were getting

a divorce, I kissed you.

I was twenty-one.

Your mouth tasted as I had understood

it would. Hot and salty

like the day on the beach when we met.

 

We drive to your parent’s house at the coast.

I am twenty-four, feeling fourteen.

You wear the same gold aviators from the 90’s

lean back into the leather seat

of your Dad’s vintage sports car

your left hand on my knee.

 

I say- build me a house

and I’ll write you a sonnet.

You say- marry me

and slip your hand up my dress

as I lean back in green dappled sunlight

whispering

yes, yes yes.

 

 

 

New Poems: Mustard Wednesday

 

A bright mustard stain

of glowering light,

everyone’s faces

lit up in it

like some peculiar

Caravaggio-

 

the sort of light

one can’t get away from;

even behind the eyelids

it shows all the scars

in microscopic detail,

 

high-lighting imperfection

as if whimsically thrown onto a

neon light-box,

but with a snide smile

 

at the grubby silhouette

you wear, the oil-slicked pavements,

free afternoon concerts

the smell of orange in the afternoon glare.

 

They are all trying to escape this

day, the bruised sky

in brutal honesty

drenching the sordid tiles

of the hall,

the filthy pigeons in shadow,

the shredded malaise of the four poster bed,

 

the voice in purple velvet

gloria patri et filio et spirito sancti

 

staining everything,

bright mustard.

The Day Before I Was Born

My mother told me this. When she woke

it was already hot, beads of sweat clung

to her lower lip. My father bought her

a glass of juice and waited while she dressed

in a yellow slip, pinned her hair with tortoise-shell

combs.  Before breakfast they walked round

the indian, the name the villagers had given 

the route that happened to pass 

Vikram Seth’s cottage. My mother had hayfever,

the roads thinned with the heavy overhanging

clumps of cow-parsley. She wore the pale suede moccasins

she’d bought after reading Hiawatha, said she felt 

so big that when they reached home she lay on

her back under the thatched verandah watching

the daylight moving clouds of dust into the hall, said

the light was clear and glassy green like looking up

from the bottom of a swimming pool to the

surface. Her name for me had been Maeve that day,

or Timothy, depending, but she’d have liked

Maeve. She wrote a shopping list as my father took

a photograph; she was laughing, trying to

write with a pen in her mouth, in one arm a

Siamese, in the other a Russian blue, says

perhaps everything was heightened by expectation

but she can still remember the sharp taste

of mango; the smell of the pencils she had

sharpened, the thin spirals of wood

curling in the sun. As it darkened towards

evening she saw the flash of the silver-tipped wings

of a wood owl, its low little hoots drifting

up from the edge of the moonlit valley.

Best Reads of 2008

Tea on the Blue Sofa by Natasha Illum Berg

Femme Fatale: The Life of Mata Hari by Pat Shipman

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S Eliot

The Harbour Beyond the Movie by Luke Kennard

Bright Young People by D. J. Taylor

Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

The Man with the Dancing Eyes by Sophie Dahl

The State of Africa by Martin Meredith

Women Who Read Are Dangerous by Stefan Bollman

HAPPY NEW YEAR

……………………and happy reading!!

It’s Snowing!!!!!

New Poems: Hippopotamus

 

She was shaving hairs

from red-brown potatoes.

I was annoying her,

with stories of hippo, telling her

the myth that hippo sweat blood, but really

secrete red liquid that cools them,

protects their backs like sun-cream,

watching her hands deftly scraping

the thick skin, the fine tilt

of the blade, its angle sliding

down the potato, mirroring her face.

 

I saw the knife go in, the skin

peel up like an apple skin,

the vein open, just as I got to

the part about Ovid searching for

pieces of her husbands body,

the punishment she inflicted

on the river horse, which is what

they called the hippopotamus then.

 

The line was clean, creased

like a baby’s smile, the sprays

intermittent as party poppers.

When it got really bad

she would say she meant to do it.

 

But I swear I saw her

slip.

 

Today we will be mostly mad

We walk before sunset.

It is -1 degrees celsius.

On Port Meadow the mini lake has frozen solid and scores of people have taken to the ice. It is a cheering post-Christmas sight, with the sun disappearing below the horizon in an apricot blaze, the Canadian geese taking flight, shire horses huddling in groups, stamping the white-tipped grass and snorting great puffs of hot air from their nostrils.

The half moon is already luminous in the sky. The skaters glide across the ice in great circles; some competently, some hesitant, tapping and shrieking each time a crack appears.

 

Even the canal has frozen in some stretches, breaking off in thick islands of ice to float under the bridges.

We walk out of Oxford into the country and find a path back that no-one seems to have walked yet today. Yesterdays snow is still blanketing the ground, there are no foot-prints, paw-prints, all is quiet. In the ruts bordering the path are deep silver puddles, like discs of mirror glinting under the moonlight.

They are uncrushed, flawless, like a string of glassy beads leading us toward home and warmth.

Ahead, a family of four come toward us, the children run ahead ruddy-faced and flushed with excitement, carrying their skates over their shoulders with the laces tied in bows. We think sweet.

They crush each iced puddle.

Every one.

Broken up and bleeding muddy water.

On impact they creak so sadly it’s as though it hurts.

My man says it’s strange, this empathy I have for inanimate objects, reminds me of our path yesterday past all the cast-out Christmas trees, their branches so bare, leaning forlornly against the garden walls. 

I just did it again. Forlorn?

He picks me up by the waist, kisses me, puts me down again, does a star jump to catch the last slip of sun, says to me,

“today my darling, we will be mostly mad”.

New Year African safari

Kilifi

Tsavo

for a bit of this…..

home to Naivasha…

On the road again!

Fenestration

When he left the door was just

ajar, the spools of sunlight rapt

in their enclosed slither, falling

across the dresser. A pale shirt

gave up over the back of a chair.

 

In the glass, water contained itself;

floorboards sprang back, flush and

equal as though there had never

been footsteps, never been lips

or shoulder-blades, or a shadow

fallen across the blind. I pushed

the door to then, as though

I had never opened it.

Le Mal d’Afrique

She wakes in the redundant hour before dawn

with a racing heart from prolific

slideshow dreams of rusting pangas,

scores of blackbirds,

a pale-faced correspondent in a flak

jacket beckoning to her over a disembodied

typewriter at Chania Falls.

 

The dogs reassure her that all is well;

motionless, the flutter of their breath

sweetening the dense humidity of the air.

The porch-light pools ambiguous coloured

light over the gardens as she wraps her

shoulders in a rug, the ginger tweed of the wool

scratchy against her skin.

 

On the tray in the dining room, Samson

has left a set of blue and white china

teacups and a Turkish coffee-pot. She

lights a Sportsman despite the hour, the match ignites,

room glowing gold for a second, comforting her

before descending once again into the gloom.

She shivers, re-wraps the rug tighter.

 

It has rained during the night and the slowly

approaching dawn hums and fizzes with

millions of insects mating and multiplying.

She hears Rose come in through the back door,

clatter about in the kitchen. She sits still in that strange

green light trying to work out what has

rattled her, she who has slept soundly through

night-raids and the sputter of gun-fire.

 

The smell of yesterdays wedding still

hangs on the air, the flame tree beyond

the porch strung with faded bunting,

paper lanterns and burnt-out candles,

a strip of torn tulle at its base. She thinks

of Teo’s speech binding them all together,

we will never leave Africa, the caramel tea

suddenly drying on her tongue as she

 

remembers the nervous laughter that had

followed. She walks out into the garden

strewn with shredded confetti, the sun rising

above the faded purple outline of the Ngong hills.

London would be shrouded in darkness still,

a few burnt out stars and the glittering flicker

 

of the tail-lights of planes coming into Heathrow.

Slowly an apricot blaze spreads across the

acacias as night lifts off, leaving only strips

of shadow among the trees. She accepts her fate,

stooping to collect a handful of bourganvillea blossom

for her dressing table and returns slowly to the house,

trailing her silk kimono over the red dust.

New Poems: Talisman

Footsteps echo in the hall,

in each pause, the fall of heavy fabric.

 

Pure morning. Quenched of dreams, scenes

of the piano played beautifully by a cat

 

wearing orange shantung, to a Bengali poet

lounging on a raffia bed. It was Zanzibar.

 

The amulet is engraved with the figure of a centaur.

He unties the leather thong from her throat,

 

picks the fig seeds stuck in the casing. She

removes her gloves, finger by finger.

 

The crashing of an ocean and broken sculpture. She

lifts herself from the embroidered bed,

 

the afternoon saffron, kneels to inspect the cracked

tiles for scraps of poems as the lantern candles are lit

 

late into the evening, as though stars hung by only

strings. She searches the beach wrapped in black silk,

 

wary of tiny sea-creatures and wrecked ships.

The amulet glows dully as she chooses her steps. Desolate and proud.

 

 

Lucy Barlow, Delicate Boundaries- Press Release 20/03/09

Please find the published words at the following site link: http://www.arttattler.com/englandlondongalleries2.html

 

Lucy Barlow, Delicate Boundaries

23 April – 16 May 2009 

      Our City Reduced by Lucy Barlow

‘For a long time I’ve been the girl who does the drawings of birds and cakes’.

First Floor Projects are delighted to present Delicate Boundaries, a solo show of work by Lucy Barlow. Shedding a formal narrative, Lucy Barlow’s new collection of abstract watercolour, gouache landscapes and fine art drawings reveal a significant departure from her previous work, ‘I am still in control, but it is less controlling than my previous work. It is expansive. I am still a spectator, still questioning, but without the questions impeding on the natural progression of the work itself.’

The fine art drawings are reminiscent of her previous whimsical illustrations, which she describes as ‘contained, formal compositions…very controlled, very fine, lyrical line drawings’. But this control, she indicates was a metaphorical boundary. Her new drawings have evolved; by using coloured or lead pencils on paper, dip pens and inks filled in with watercolour, she creates wonderfully witty, tongue in cheek drawings such as Bears Say No that participate in the negative space around them, and that still exhibit some of her old humour; ‘there is a childish part of me that doesn’t want to give up the ghost, or stop being silly’.

Intuitive colour placement ensures Barlow’s abstracts remain anti-formulaic, creating a tense sense of push and pull between the background and foreground. This way of working with colour, Barlow believes, was inspired by Helen Frankenthaler’s unprimed canvases, ‘vast vistas and sea, so alive they breathe’. Moments in time are captured but remain fluid through the depth of tension between Barlow’s colours; paintings such as Fire Ladders fizz with freshness and light. Lucy Barlow’s work possesses an intentional sense of the unresolved – ‘there are questions that have no answers, and I am trying to reflect this without the ends being tied up perfectly in a bow’. 

The work of Louise Bourgeois encouraged Barlow to experiment with materials and engage in a constant monologue with herself, while using her work as therapy. ‘I used to feel guilty and selfish, so self-indulgent, being an artist’ she says, ‘but the Bourgeois show really reminded me of the importance of creativity and the arts in the world. There is a wonderful freedom of expression.’ Time, not frozen but physically ‘gestural’, creates a moment for dialogue between the visual work and the viewer – the paintings encourage an accessing, even an embracing of the dormant parts of oneself. ‘The communication of the visual bypasses words’ says Barlow, something she experiences first-hand when encountering work by Louise Bourgeois. In response to this lesson she has learnt from Bourgeois, Barlow’s work searches for ‘chaos and imperfection, while finding comfort within that formless, liberating way of working’.

Lucy Barlow studied at Central St. Martins, and her work featured in group shows at the Modern Art Oxford (2004) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (2005). Since graduating from Oxford Brookes University in 2006, Lucy Barlow has participated in several collaborative shows, including Obsessions at Modern Art Oxford (2008) and Sarah Brown and Lucy Barlow, Oxford Town Hall (2009). This is her first solo show.

This is the inaugural exhibition of First Floor Projects. From his London home, James Tregaskes will host a variety of exhibitions by new contemporary artists. The gallery heralds a return to the salon, presenting and dealing art in a residential space.

 

 For further information please contact Hannah Magor

hannah@firstfloorprojects.com  

 

Show me Times of Light and Plath

New Poems: Columbia Road

Letter from Columbia Road, E2, to an unknown address in the Saharan desert

1.

Because even as you fall asleep, imagining me here,

waking, scripted and precise in the rooms of

your house, I hear you whisper l’aurore, just

as the room drowns yellow as the sun draws a line

across the bare boards, the dust strung across

the shutters, just as the newspaper sellers shout

Jade loses her cancer battle on mother’s day.

 

8am, and imagine that the Sunday market has begun,

that as I drink your coffee, the cobbles

of Columbia Road are strewn with acres of cut flowers.

The cockney dollybird and her diamond geezer on the corner

stall, All Fur Coat and no Knickers hum to acid house,

lay out their gingham cloths. He calls her Duchess, yells

two for a fivah, as she hands out decorated cookies and red balloons.

 

Throngs pass beneath the window, a nation of shopkeepers

in shot pink, with armfuls of peonies and cherry blossom

pressed against absinthe green tissue and newspaper.

By four, unwary petals find rain, sprigs are snapped,

the balloons escape over the spires.

 

2.

Imagine that last night, as you woke, I watched

a strawberry sunset blush over the London Fields,

the cider drinkers, picnic hampers and strewn bicycles,

wheels still spinning. A man in a beret ate oysters

from a tub, licked salt water from his wrists.

 

And later, at the darkest of your night,

I watched a pin up lounge in a giant martini glass

above the sign ‘where fine feathers make fine birds’,

as the jaundiced seep of neon lights

from the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club

pooled across the street. Through plumes

of cigarette smoke, the boy with the

anchor tattoo got drunk for the first time

and we looked up to see the early swallows come

in over London like tiny bombers. Heaven protects

children, sailors and drunks, he said, raising

his glass to the stained vanilla sky.

 

3.

Imagine that by now, the blossom is out

in the back yards, hooped and linking honeysuckle

lines the fence. That having survived the Sahara,

the swallows have crossed continents,

crossed Morocco, Spain and the Pyrenees,

flown over western France, and are here above me now,

the first of them, flittering and swooping over the garden, low,

the metallic glint of royal blue, a cream-buff chest

a russet flash of chin and throat, long forked tails

like streamers catching the light. They remind me

that a feather, traveled 200 miles a day at a speed of

22 miles per hour, can fall at my feet from where you are.

Demain il fera jour.

 

Drunkeness, night jitters and anaerobic digestion

On Wednesday we got drunk with my new friends. (Thanks, M, for reminding me to write this thing.) It was great. I pretty much never get drunk. Yay, drunkety drunk drunk. Oops, sicky.

There was an extraordinary moment when I watched my boyfriend try to make rataouille from tomato soup and old rice. 

Yesterday was a write off. One of those days when you’re so hungover you can only grunt at eachother, maybe walk slowly, to co-op and walk slower back. Cook a bacon sandwich. Crawl back to bed clutching paracetamol. Try to read book – words strangely wander across the page of their own accord. Give up. Make love. Mmmm. Make love again. Unusual, but nice. Funny how being hungover makes one especially good at it. Naked bodies, skin, breath, sweat. Feels amazing. So amazing could almost do it again. But no, a little queazy. Must be seeking pleasure to block out drumming in head. Go for potter together around the block, a pair of old terrapins blinking at the light. Find a pretty pink house with no door. Strange. Both rub our heads and try to think…. it hurts. Potter on home and make love again on the sofa with the film Love in the Time of Cholera on as a backdrop.

I sit upright in bed at 4am, sick with panic. I’ve had no nightmare; the house, the street outside, the city sleeps on around me soundless. My first thought -reasonably- i’m having a heart attack. My heart races. Stops. I get worried. No, still going. I look at the man beside me, curled foetal, his breath fluttering on my arm. I look at him. And then I know . Death. I am going to die. And after that I will never see him again. Worse still – he will die before me. I feel the cruelty of passed time. Wasted time. Time I haven’t really appreciated. I haven’t managed to quit smoking. Time lessened. More time wasted. I have smoked tens of thousands of cigarettes – must be – in the past ten years. They say every one reduces your life expectancy by five minutes. So what’s that? I sit in bed trying to work it out. Never the mathmatician. I think: there’s too much to do! I’ve got books to write. I want to spend more time with my parents- they are getting older. I want to breakfast in Rome yet, wake up in Cuba, make love in Cairo. There’s – oh, there’s so much I want. I want grandchildren. A family. A big house with a farmhouse kitchen. A sprawling family, kids running around. Food. A great big jewish family. It’s all about the family.

My morbid, glass-half-empty voice kicks in. We’re all on a long conveyor belt. Now my grandparents are gone: mother and father pushed to the front of the queue, then us, then my children, then my grandchildren. When people talk to me like this, I think: Hello! Don’t be so self-centred, of course you’re going to die, we all are! I would like to say i’m not afraid of death. Never thought I was.

It’s just that i’m sat up in bed at 4am. Alone. I’ll admit it – scared.

I wake again at 7am. Lay there. The alarm goes off. Neither of us move. It goes off again. Man beside me whimpers. I remember my night jitters – fuck, that was bad. I must learn to control my imagination because it isn’t all fluffy rabbits and andrex puppies, I can tell you. Sometimes it tricks you, wants to think dark. Think about this. I don’t want to! Think about it. Oh, ok.

Now i’m at work. It’s all very realistic here. Oxford University-ish. Web conferences. Everything is A4, A5, he’s on the A44, her flight no’s the E44JK. Comforting, somehow. The fat professor is irritatingly enthusiastic as usual. Hi, everyone – i’ve brought doughnuts. She always brings doughnuts. I look around. No-one is eating them. Only her -  munching away. She calls my desk from hers (they are metres apart). The Serbians are coming. What, a whole army of them? Quick everyone, take position. I imagine them cowering under their desks, shielding bullets with their briefcases and being suspiciously good at it. Anyway, tangent again – see? See how easy it is? Later it’s: The Russians are coming. I’ll go and collect them from reception Rachel. Feel like Tim in The Office. Off I go.

I love photocopiers. No, really. Wonderful piece of technology, as Rachel would say. She’s eating another doughnut. Unbelievable. I enter figures on a database until I want to scream, run from the building out into drizzle. I write notes on my novel; the ace up my sleeve. Carry on proof reading the papers some don is publishing tomorrow. Something about micro and community scale, oh god - just read the words anaerobic digestion, pyrolysis, gasification. Even if they were spelt wrong I wouldn’t know.  Think i’ll go outside and smoke fag.

12,000 words

I write.I write all day until the blue of the screen and the words dancing across it still burn my vision an hour after I stop.

I go to the coffee shop on the corner, the last slip of sunlight shivering over the roofs of the houses. Oxford In April, greenish light, as though the city is underwater. The end of another working day; suits pass, shiny briefcases graze my knees as I sit drinking coffee. My characters have come, uninvited, clustering around the tiny aluminum table. They bicker as those who know eachother too well do, vie for my attention. I am the maternal. I shelter them, give them life.

Ava is her name. Ava the protagonist, my leading lady. She shivers, unaccustomed to the cold now after Africa. Her knees are knobbly, knocking together. She is quiet, watches the others from hooded eyes. I know her better than myself. Her greatest fear is not loneliness but being set apart. 

I bring them home with me, what the hell. Our house is crowded and empty. White petals blow into the kitchen through the back door, confetti on the tiles.

Twelve thousand words. The even wholeness of the number has halted me here. I cannot write more today.

Child’s shoe. Navy blue. Scuffed buckle.

There is a child’s shoe in the boot of my car.

I don’t know how, or why.

It sits there looking at me as I unload the shopping. Navy blue, scuffed buckle. The shoe taunts me but I can’t bring myself to throw it out. I am reminded of Hemingway’s greatest work. A six word short story: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. 

But there is only one. It is a child’s shoe, perhaps a five year olds. The writer in me tells me to keep it, use it as a prop, a spark. But on this subject I am speechless, rendered mute. My boyfriend says silently Throw it out. It is reminding you. But so much does. He does. The folic acid vitamin pills. The eight week scan photograph in black and white. The colour red. How do you grieve for a child you never had, just an inch and a half of translucent foetus? But nostrils, ten tiny immaculate fingers? 

The nurse was eight months herself. She breathed over the monitor. A heartbeat, persistently fluttered on the screen. Life. We stared.

My body has rid itself of the hormones. For that I am grateful at least. I no longer crave oranges though the smell of them is just leaving my hands. I have lost the near stone I gained. Strange to think that when I left Africa I was ‘with child’, now in Oxford, I am not. 

I look at photographs of my mother. I am one. She holds me, dances to Alison Moyet. Her hair is cropped, her body lithe and coltish. The picture exudes nostalgic giddiness. 

I can’t help it. I wake up in the night. Haunted by the navy shoe. Its purpose.

Cape

A prose poem

With the onset of rain in the west they hunted from the Northern blocks. December. Wore medium dark green to dry grass coloured clothing, long trousers. Good boots. She in tailor made khaki. Spread map, planned route. Game, gun import, export licences. A caravan of porters followed, in the convoy a trained cook. Each trophy came home with a story. Distance covered. Sudden encounters. Bones felt the shrivelled, quick frisson of the explorers. They hunted buffalo. Eland. Tiger fish. Fast or slow. The small aeroplane lifted them to animal movement. Camp nights dulled by dry martini. She spoke in calibres. Said know your gun. Seek the moment. They split grins, wanted more of her. Shot her first piece of game at thirteen, she said. A beautiful full-feathered mallard that fell to a well-placed shot, the course of her life struck in an instant. Sweden to Mombasa by boat. Cape buffalo; the soul of Africa. It was a worthy opponent, noble, brave. She shot the war-battered bull through the heart. Mount Meru: blues, strong tea. She brings the heavy calibre.458 Lott rifle into action. She recites sonnets. A wall of cocoa muscle gaining speed. A minotaur head. The moment of truth.

 

Recipe for a Poem

I think I have the Oxford lergy. My sister came down yesterday from London- woohoo- finally, after 8 months. Why is it that Londoners never leave London? A strange phenomenon. Anyway - I was wandering the streets of Oxford this morning feeling rather better and then rather worse again and I started thinking that I have been writing so much prose lately I am worried I may begin to lose my poetic voice, or worse, just forget to write poetry all together. Even the last poem I wrote is a prose poem. Then I remembered an exercise I did last term, sorry – semester, that I really enjoyed and thought i’d share it.

This exercise, originally written by Jim Simmerman but adapted by the poet Jane Yeh, has been the most useful of those on the Creative Writing Masters this year. As Yeh writes: ‘I created this exercise for my beginning poetry writing students, who seemed to be overly concerned with logical structures and transparent themes at the expense of free-for-all wackiness, inventive play, and the sheer oddities of language itself.’

Anyway, it’s what i’ll be doing today…from the sofa…

Instructions:

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor or simile

2. Use a piece of ‘talk’ or speech in English that you’ve heard (preferably in slang or dialect, or a piece that you don’t understand)

3. Say something specific but utterly preposterous

4. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem

5. Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction

6. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective

7. Use a phrase from a language other than English

8. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem

9. Make a nonhuman object say or do something human (personification)

10. Include the full name of a real person

11. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that echoes an image from earlier in the poem

An example is ‘Moon Go Away, I Don’t Love You No More’ by Jim Simmerman, which begins with the line- 

Morning comes on like a wink in the dark.

My poem, ‘Matinee’, which I posted a while back was a by-product of the same exercise.

I don’t want to face it alone

the painted word

I have reached that age when one visits the heart merely as a courtesy…

Silt days

Le Mal D’Afrique?

Days sift into eachother at the moment, tiny and treacherous as fine sand. Days with no beginning and no end. I am restless, walking about the house barefoot, standing and staring out of the window, into the fireplace, at our still unmade bed. What is it? What is it? Time flickers, an afternoon doused in sunlight. The globe seems to revolve over my glass desk. I pick up the telephone, dial New York, static fizzing across an ocean. Five hours behind. Apathy.

I email Nairobi. As I press send, the sun is setting over the Ngong Hills. Teatime in Oxford, listless. It is a day when a cup should be chaperoned by a saucer, for its own good. I stand, trembling at the array of coloured boxes. They promise an end to inertia- ‘revitalizing’, ‘relaxing’, ‘energizing’. I choose a loose, perfumed jasmine. Poured, it is the colour of caramel. It sits bitter on my tongue.

A day of fretful finger tapping, but the world is pooled in a terrible calm. A message from London. My sister has negotiated for and taken, a new apartment in the East End in the time it has taken me to pick buds from the rose bush at the bottom of the garden, read and reread two pages of a novel, make tea and watch my lover shower. It troubles him that I do this – tag along, trail behind. He doesn’t understand it. What’s wrong with you today? he says, half smiling, flecks of white foam on his neck. 

I sit on the looseat watching the water run over his body and text my sister back. She is probably sketching floorplans, plotting the exact geography of her furniture over square feet. Moving house is her passion. Nesting. Packing and unpacking to discover her possessions as if for the first time emerging from frothy tissue. Every home she makes is more beautiful than the one before; carefully lit, tasteful, scattered with tokens of exotic travel. There are two new elements to encorporate in the new nest; a mosaic tiled garden table, and a cat flap. Are our beloved cats are going to like London life? I can’t really see them being Hackney cats.

We are a strange nomadic family now. I wonder how it would feel to be normal- parents either together or not,  married parents, one family home, one family home on this continent, a steady home, for our passed-around-cats. I wonder how it would feel to have my fathers name instead of my mothers, to have been christened, confirmed, to have godparents. Nowhere is home. I think if I could have all that, would I want it? The answer, of course, is no.  I suppose really, I like being rootless. I like it that my father is a man who disappears, only to emerge tanned and beardy to hold my hand through a crisis. That my mother is apart; aloof and beautiful.  For us, after all, home is eachother. It is love. It is the fortune of friendship, the gold-link chain I play with around my throat all day.

Lately in the mornings I wake with an uneasy sense of corrosion, drenched in sweat. I barely wriggle free from dreams of sparse bush country, vast deserts of sky and twisted acacias to find that I am trapped in blankness; walls, ceiling, floor. I pick up Isak Dinesen. Beloved, battered copy. Her words snag at my subconscious… 

 ”up in this high air you breathed easily …You woke up in the morning and thought, Here I am where I ought to be, because here I belong“.

Africa. Longing. Freedom.

Fridge Magnet Poem

Summer.

You kicked off your sneakers and

lay on the bed playing join the dots.

I have a winged badger, a teapot,

colouring pencils! Gossamer fell

over the cathedral, thin and light.

Sycamore seeds settled on the ledge,

pigeons were soporific in the heat.

Naked from the rafters you stared

down into the orange grove. The sky

over the city was buff yellow. Warmth

leaked through windows to a flutter

of caramel curls. I was flawed,

cornered in the centre of the room.

 

Winter.

On the glass your breath mists. You

scrape a heart. With the final lick

of sunset it rains, hails, shoots shards

of snagged ice. You say you are an actress,

a natural. You litter blank verse and fiction

over the labyrinthine city, the gridded streets

a vague grey. You make tea, work out; rent

and lift, smoke, bleach your teeth, flicking

pages of a magazine. The day ekes itself out.

I shuffle home in sheepskin and wonder

what you meant by unspectacular planning.

Los Angeles greets you, snarling snow.

Oyster

Gathered from your bed by hand

from shallow Californian water;

your pale, radial folds nestle in sharp,

iced gravel. Pacific. Lent cream, sancerre,

the slightest shallot, I can still

taste your brackish water, the intimacy

of magnesium, copper, your rare acid.

 

We sit and cup you, ostreidae. Kiss,

spilling your nutty juice into our

mouths. Behind glass your family

of pilgrims, thorny and saddled

are scrubbed, freshly shucked, peppered

with white. Across the coast your

feather-shelled sister bleeds

a gem pearl, the colour of mushroom.

 

From your reef, where your outer shell

tilted upward, improving water, catchers

have snatched you from the throat

of river and seacoast.

Emperors have paid for you in gold.

 

Married to chilled champagne,

your small, three chambered heart

pumps colourless blood, cares not.

But your firm, deep-cupped sex cells

spray zinc cloud into our tubs

until we know the brisk taste of you

and go home, fumbling into the

snowscape of our bed -

forgetting already, your frilly ridges.

 

Clung to roots in mangrove swamps,

cobbled across the Kentish flats,

your armies of children harvest. Creamy

metallic, tinted beige, their razor hinges

prepare for the lacquered bar, for the grey silk

suit to comment upon their buttery delicacy.

Against a last opaque horizon; frosted

tumblers of lemon vodka, curled shavings of rind,

they shed their shells like tutus and await the swallow,

awake, unwounded, alive.

Davidoff Nights

In loving memory of Jacqueline du Pre

Under Sienese twilight he listens to the broadcast

from Wigmore Street. In the gloaming, brittle shadows

scroll palm patterns across the shutters.

The first nebulous notes tilt the room.

 

When he closes his eyes, he can hear her careful positioning.

Seat, steady, neck behind the cream of the left ear, rustle

of tulle. All evening he thinks her slim under the Byzantine

colour of her clothes, body resonant against maple, bowed,

 

transferring vibration between white knees. Her arms hoop

around carved neck, dense body. Across the vinyl records here and there,

the Persian literature piled by an unmade bed, he hears her stroke

from the wrist, hears the linear oscillation of her lower arm.

 

Senses the depressed string

close to the bridge, close to the precipice, the unbridled wolf tones

shivering over the Santa Catarina, metallic,

lingering, contoured across the gaps in speech, in breath,

resonant once the air has filled with sand and the refrigerator hums

 

on, stirring the rhododendrons in the window box. Her fingertips,

he thinks, absorb motion, fluttering over the oil glaze of reddish

caramel and wound gut strings to the final coaxed chord. One

fine stray horsehair settles against ebony. E minor sounds on, on and on

 

until he has forgotten lunch and the tastes that followed, the careful

opening of the wine, names of powerful men, talk of Cassius

Clay and Cuba. Until, finally, he can believe in a world without nam,

countries without borders, an earth without maps.

Guardian.co.uk Life and Style

Click here to view online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/may/27/regency-home-eco-makeover

On meeting Baba, 1937

Tentative as a debutante you were,

turbanned in men’s clothes,

digging up lettuces. Reduced to

standing in unnatural attitude

before a Georgian house, you spoke

of your faded dynasty, the chronology

of other waif-like beauties (all the

fluffy blones). And you, faintly headmistressy,

tapping to Cole Porter. In the afternoon

you wore lame and a hat tilted, just

so. You were sartorial, filmy, the blossoms

surrounding the house in acres of white,

an 18th century Chien Lung wallpaper

in the salon – a conciliatory gesture, I thought,

for that place, all the bones that were there.

Breakthrough

It is thirty degrees. I feel very English today: I have taken refuge inside the house, when I go out I wear a wide brimmed sunhat of my mothers and keep to the shady patches. I have taken to drinking a lot of mint tea and smoking more than usual.

This morning I woke up to find my body covered by a map, and my boyfriend deep in concentration, circling anywhere he thought might be cool enough for our long-anticipated motorbike trip. I think Morocco’s off. Perhaps we should have considered temperatures in August…??! Oh, and that we’ll be wearing leathers.

Last night we came back from a supper in the Cotswolds at 110 mph as the sky opened above us. Whatever has been frozen beneath the surface within me for the past few weeks slowly began to breathe again. Whether it was the rain, or the speed, the wine at supper, the incredible feeling of love and trust from the person I was clinging to but I was delirious by the time we re-entered our sleepy city. Its tiered amphitheatre-style rows of houses huddled under the mauve sky had never looked so beautiful.

When we were home again and it was dark I went outside and took off my clothes. I have never really thought of myself as a particularly brave, spontaneous or exhibitionist person but it seemed very right, at that moment, to stand cloaked in that hot tropical darkness and allow the rain to fall on me.

Last night I had the longest, most complete night’s sleep I have had in months.

And I am writing again.

New Poem: How Often

How often have I sought You when the lapwings

cry, and the earth is shattered by winter? Or when

the wind comes so cold on me from the bright

mauve peppered sky, and I, speaking your name

have stopped, wrists unbraceleted, the same

as before, yet different, separate? Why would

rain not be the same without You, or the grass, springy

underfoot not forget the tread of where You were, my love?

As often as I sought meaning in the corners of a silent hour,

in the loveliness of a single evenings English sky, in the

quick step along the cobbles where You and I have watched

the people go by, in every hour that I have known. And my

lips know too, when they kiss You goodbye, every bone

of the hand that has held mine in the heather and over

oceans, I know by sight or blinded, in the light or sunken

shadow of a dry, open shell. You were there to find

when I said how often, how often I had sought You,

You who know not the fear of mine that days

are taken away from us in hours. I’m in a sweet, strange

place now that the seasons have changed and I walk the

meandering lanes in mists and woodsmoke, alone,

rearranged, not quite without You, until the slow

choking start of morning breaks over the city, departing

so that I sometimes think perhaps I could forget You,

that we could be apart? I think it, but my heart. My heart.

New Poem: Daughter

Sleeveless you arrived in Morning

black, slick, strawberry scented,

littering the hot street with your

truisms and dewy cries in a time

of falling tyrants and confusing shades

of lipstick. Later you saw the bats spot

-lighting on the drive, the pick-up beside

the porch filled with the swollen

scent of rotting mangoes- you

wrinkled your tiny nose- the honey

coloured moths dive-bombing the

lamp, and dying, falling like scraps

of tawdry silk to the floor. Then

the grass, singing with cicadas

went silent for you, only a dog

barked once on Forest Road and far

beyond the hills of bumping logs,

freckled flakes of ash spattered

white on the neurotic thorn-twine

of sisal. I watched you wake from

sticky sleep in your striped t-

shirt, demanding soda, watched

you endearing, manipulative,

licking old ice-cream from the sores

on your mouth. We had never

seen anything like you in

this place under the mountain-

the serious blue veins on your

arms, that paper skin, loosening

the hooks of your linen-leaf

patterned dress and sighing in

your stained bed at night. Outside

branches dripped, the fig tree

loosed its leaves forgetful.

And your midnight sigh –

delicate, like a sacrament.

In the fading light – Womad 2009

We were lucky enough to start our ‘European tour’ early at Womad (World of music, arts and dance festival) thanks to a very kind certain someone who gave us free passes for the weekend. Probably the best festival I have been to yet – this coming from someone who prefers not to ’slum it’ too much – i.e clean portaloos please, and carries a small bottle of anti-bacterial handwash. Well if the government will keep banging on about Swine Flu, they get what they want, which as far as I can tell is national hysteria. Wonderful food- fish curry, hot doughnuts with coffee, crepes, cupcakes, Indian, Asian etc etc and music, particularly ‘Paris-based Algerian chaåbi stylist Kamel El-Harrachi’. I spent most of the time wandering around photographing flags…

Tomorrow 5am we depart for warmer climes (eventually)- first stop Paris, tomorrow night and then on down to Lake Como and along the Italian coast to Naples, maybe even Sicily if we have any money left by then. I am half packed- a pathetic little collection of personal belongings- credit card, toothbrush, shorts, bikini, Chanel No.5 (essential I told my begrudging boyfriend, one cannot possibly travel anywhere without a bottle of perfume. I think he disagrees, thinking along the lines of Napolean etc etc). My panier (the larger) is almost full, as the other half is taken up by my travel insurance documents, which i’d better take as I had to wait 2 hours to get them due to Swine Flu (not me, everybody else, who apparently are all on the phone to the post office in a panic convinced they all have the disease and are due to die shortly-hence putting in an early claim). Have to get out of here. But it’s always comforting to know Gordon Brown is on the case. He’s that type of strong, dependable hero who can lead us through the darkness- (Flu is the updated version of the Black Death, don’t you know).

End of rant. Back to the fading light…

Above was rather a cool van housing the Independent team.

Saturday night had a very ambient vibe- smoky air, lots of children and funny outfits, Janet Street Porter looking damp, fairy lights strung along the ridge of teepees flanking the adjoining field, and the backdrop of Charlton Park house and the steeple of a church behind. After the complications over the past few weeks, everything seemed optimistic again- and we wheedled home through the Wiltshire lanes harbouring a kind of sweet euphoria, romance rekindled.

This is the song i'll be humming along to early tomorrow morning:

'No one to talk to, all by myself;
No one to walk with, I'm happy on the shelf;
Ain't misbehavin, I'm saving my love for you.'

Ain't Misbehavin- Fats Waller.

Polar

I was walking along in one of those moods Where I do stuff like look up at the light coming through The trees or down at the crocuses that just grew and get This really renewing sense of things. And then I looked up Again and saw the last leaf leave a branch bare and then I thought of you, That you were so bored you died.

For R.B