after the painting Harmony by Remedios Varo
I set the musical stave on my desk,
strung notes on its metal wires,
using fossils, shells, prisms, as quavers
and semi-quavers, trying to make music
from matter. I summoned treasures
from the chest for so long
I thought it was bottomless, the source
of the rivers of sound that drove my world.
I longed for harmonies to grow the trees,
so the songs of their light would flood my studio.
The muse even lent a hand. She emerged
from the peeling wallpaper, her vellum-
wrinkled fingers moved the notes
until a faint prelude crept out.
The air vibrated like branches in a breeze.
I blew through the clef to add my breath
and the trees became a hovering forest. I composed
falling rain, dew-drip, the budding leaves.
From Poetry London 60 (Summer 2008)
IO spills
on desert like a spoon of cold blood
where the mighty auroch graze at her big white stain
IO touches
her tongue to god’s
through a priceless gauze. he likes this
IO of the
the abomasum and scur. the king of egypt
bathes in rosewater for her
IO - a portrait
by Gerhard Richter: haptic rosettes
of cardinal blue / fog in the Strait of Istanbul / horn-cooped moon
IO can’t concentrate
for the gadfly stings. her temperament is assumed
to be multidimensional. she has, after all, such human eyes.
The nudity of it is delicious and cool,
like an iced pear sitting on a plate.
Alone in this room of ruffs and collars,
it is saying how good it feels to be a neck,
to have the same number of vertebrae
as a giraffe, the same grace as a swan,
and since it looks like a delicious fruit,
it invites appetite, a slight salivation
in the viewer’s mouth, or else
as happens in my case, a sudden urge
to kiss its nape, as though it is a photo
of my lover rather than the portrait
of Sir Thomas Wyatt, painted just a year
before he lost his head and therefore
made this neck, still perfect in its seven
vertebrae and in the carrying of blood,
surperfluous, a limb that might as well
be clothed or not exist at all.
Except, it is so beautifully presented here,
that even if there were no head attached,
I’m sure it would continue to draw eyes
just for itself and not its purposes.
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