The complication of those earrings the texture of the paint around your eyes the sun’s highlights in your hair
The redness of those parting lips such belief in everything we said the pristine shape of your nose
Lying on the roof your head close to my heart summer blushing the sky weren’t we beautiful weren’t we beautiful then
Nothing to fret about just prolong the passing day swaying through the city weren’t we beautiful there
The precision of our jaw-lines the optimism in our hearts skidding through that midnight snowfall spelling out each other’s names as I caught you in my arms
We were so alive so in love so beautiful at that moment in our lives…
A hyper-sensitivity of feeling your art connects across the senses The roughness of ancient bark beneath gentle fingertips A kiss from rock-pool water warm against bare ankles
A double exposure a murmuration it’s poetry, the sensuality the sheer never timid beauty lensed so gracefully with such assurance and dexterity
The texture, a waking daydream a cloak of fog, shaft of sunlight A cinematic freeze-frame marked by absence the distance or proximity of pain and recovery
Point and click, your dark-room trick it’s as if you have control over the mountains the birds, the tides or consummate authorship of the nuance you convey
A solo figure in vast expanse an aloneness I recognise searching but serene Lost in the careful creation of an endless mythology loudly reverberates in me
The slow creep of new tissue like quietly vanishing tattoos it’s at your back and haunches as your work builds and soars so far from that place expressive in its woozy warmth
I hear the touch, witness the aroma I exist in awe and quiet wonder A world scatters its knitted beauty a murmuration Little charcoal sketches across watercolour paper
The spine is a map a breadcrumb trail we trace with our fingers but we can’t go back ephemeral and observable only in reflection or a photograph
Dusk tides, an evening deer a crumbling barn, eiderdown snow A swimsuit girl, the Northern Lights a neon sign, a broken rainbow midnight phone booth, stitches in skin untethered and inspirationally free
Your photography is a place I love to visit when I can It’s pure poetry you pen with the light, with your lens A lasting comfort, you translate the message I can’t help but take;
It’s impossible impossible not to love the beauty of this world…
[2021]
Thanks for reading.
An ode to the exceptional work of one of my favourite photographers; Margaret Durow.
I will never learn from my affairs they bake within my heart but nowhere else see, she looks at me she may speak to me some short time then suddenly and so completely it’s all I feel a love that is not real all I can do is hang from her every movement…
Yet again, I’m helplessly hopeful for that breath already feeding myself on the bliss of kisses promised but those suggestions don’t emanate from her or anywhere but in my spiralled mind as it fills with love for some ideal all I can do is hang from her slightest smile…
The purity of beauty is a trap for me my mind is weak and falls so quickly before I can blink, it’s all that I can see I twist until the heartbreak of this infinity…
If only obsession didn’t roost inside these bones if only my mind knew some subtle patience I’ll lay myself down in that spinning room try to think of something else or someone other but no thought can form while she has not spurned all I can do is hang myself on her polite decline…
The purity of beauty is a trap for me I build myself a cave so homely lie scheming on the hope that she embodies and twist until my heart breaks in this infinity…
Does your heart stop momentarily when confronted by beauty unexpectedly
Out walking on some autumn evening a train intersects the low setting sun crossing a bridge over the swollen river our world’s perfection is exposed so clearly
And my heart stops like a level crossing my heart stops in that moment
I take a breath a deeper breath reeling in that moment let the beauty in let the beauty fill me
Sparks crash down from atop the arches snow is falling onto cold wet lines as the train slips back into thick night the dark of winter lit by the flash-bulb of arcing beauty and in that moment
My heart stops…
When this sea recedes and that wreck’s revealed we stand below in wonder the unburied spectre towers above that always-waiting awe returns to us and in that moment
I take a breath a deeper breath drink the magic in let the beauty wash over let the beauty fill me
And my heart stops like a level crossing my heart stops in that moment as all the world rushes through me…
[2014]
Thanks for reading.
Since writing this poem, I discovered this song which says what I was trying to say much better than I could:
We were strangers by the pool there was summer on your skin I lay low, opened my whole body in the hope that you would find me
Then taking it the distance from the shore raised to the sky there were many sailors scheming on the bending of your knee
There’s a bridge in your dreams as it recedes behind a fog you wonder what it means…
Even naked, your body was a silken gown as you scurried across the room I brought you this glass paper an outcrop of shattered slate
Upon your hip some childhood scar the very first place I aim my dirty lips the innocence in your womanly eyes meets my age but not my weariness
There’s a bridge in your dreams and you wonder what it means…
I taught you all the things I knew about the moves I needed from you you later said my expertise was nothing but a trick with a flick of the wrist I’d left another scar on you
And, waking, we melted one final time before I drew from the bed you briefly begged me to stay then turned around and slept
And I know when I go you’ll find a honest barer of the tenderness you’re owed the goodness, the reality
I wonder what I brought you and I wonder what I took you were the silk that moved beneath me you were the sweetest laughter
For now, I dare not tell you as I cross that bridge vanish into the thickening fog slip from your life
The Lighthouse 