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Nigel Morgan Apr 2013
As he walked through the maze of streets from the tube station he wondered just how long it had been since he had last visited this tall red-bricked house. For so many years it had been for him a pied à terre. Those years when the care of infant children dominated his days, when coming up to London for 48 hours seemed such a relief, an escape from the daily round that small people demand. Since his first visits twenty years ago the area bristled with new enterprise. An abandoned Victorian hospital had been turned into expensive apartments; small enterprising businesses had taken over what had been residential property of the pre-war years. Looking up he was conscious of imaginative conversions of roof and loft spaces. What had seemed a wide-ranging community of ages and incomes appeared to have disappeared. Only the Middle Eastern corner shops and restaurants gave back to the area something of its former character: a place where people worked and lived.

It was a tall thin house on four floors. Two rooms at most of each floor, but of a good-size. The ground floor was her London workshop, but as always the blinds were down. In fact, he realised, he’d never been invited into her working space. Over the years she’d come to the door a few times, but like many artists and craftspeople he knew, she fiercely guarded her working space. The door to her studio was never left open as he passed through the hallway to climb the three flights of stairs to her husband’s domain. There was never a chance of the barest peek inside.

Today, she was in New York, and from outside the front door he could hear her husband descend from his fourth floor eyrie. The door was flung open and they greeted each other with the fervour of a long absence of friends. It had been a long time, really too long. Their lives had changed inexplicably. One, living almost permanently in that Italian marvel of waterways and sea-reflected light, the other, still in the drab West Yorkshire city from where their first acquaintance had begun from an email correspondence.

They had far too much to say to one another - on a hundred subjects. Of course the current project dominated, but as coffee (and a bowl of figs and mandarin oranges) was arranged, and they had moved almost immediately he arrived in the attic studio to the minimalist kitchen two floors below, questions were thrown out about partners and children, his activities, and sadly, his recent illness (the stairs had seemed much steeper than he remembered and he was a little breathless when he reached the top). As a guest he answered with a brevity that surprised him. Usually he found such questions needed roundabout answers to feel satisfactory - but he was learning to answer more directly, and being brief, suddenly thought of her and her always-direct questions. She wanted to know something, get something straight, so she asked  - straight - with no ‘going about things’ first. He wanted to get on with the business at hand, the business that preoccupied him, almost to the exclusion of everything else, for the last two days.

When they were settled in what was J’s working space ten years ago now he was immediately conscious that although the custom-made furniture had remained the Yamaha MIDI grand piano and the rack of samplers were elsewhere, along with most of the scores and books. The vast collection of CDs was still there, and so too the pictures and photographs. But there was one painting that was new to this attic room, a Cézanne. He was taken aback for a moment because it looked so like the real thing he’d seen in a museum just weeks before. He thought of the film Notting Hill when William Thacker questions the provenance of the Chagall ‘violin-playing goat’. The size of this Cézanne seemed accurate and it was placed in a similar rather ornate frame to what he knew had framed the museum original. It was placed on right-hand wall as he had entered the room, but some way from the pair of windows that ran almost the length of this studio. The view across the rooftops took in the Tower of London, a mile or so distant. If he turned the office chair in which he was sitting just slightly he could see it easily whilst still paying attention to J. The painting’s play of colours and composition compelled him to stare, as if he had never seen the painting before. But he had, and he remembered that his first sight of it had marked his memory.

He had been alone. He had arrived at the gallery just 15 minutes before it was due to close for the day.  He’d been told about this wonderful must-see octagonal room where around the walls you could view a particularly fine and comprehensive collection of Impressionist paintings. All the great artists were represented. One of Van Gogh’s many Olive Trees, two studies of domestic interiors by Vuillard, some dancing Degas, two magnificent Gaugins, a Seurat field of flowers, a Singer-Sergeant portrait, two Monets - one of a pair of haystacks in a blaze of high-summer light. He had been able to stay in that room just 10 minutes before he was politely asked to leave by an overweight attendant, but afterwards it was as if he knew the contents intimately. But of all these treasures it was Les Grands Arbres by Cézanne that had captured his imagination. He was to find it later and inevitably on the Internet and had it printed and pinned to his notice board. He consulted his own book of Cézanne’s letters and discovered it was a late work and one of several of the same scene. This version, it was said, was unfinished. He disagreed. Those unpainted patches he’d interpreted as pools of dappled light, and no expert was going to convince him otherwise! And here it was again. In an attic studio J. only frequented occasionally when necessity brought him to London.

When the coffee and fruit had been consumed it was time to eat more substantially, for he knew they would work late into the night, despite a whole day tomorrow to be given over to their discussions. J. was full of nervous energy and during the walk to a nearby Iraqi restaurant didn’t waver in his flow of conversation about the project. It was as though he knew he must eat, but no longer had the patience to take the kind of necessary break having a meal offered. His guest, his old friend, his now-being-consulted expert and former associate, was beginning to reel from the overload of ‘difficulties’ that were being put before him. In fact, he was already close to suggesting that it would be in J’s interest if, when they returned to the attic studio, they agreed to draw up an agenda for tomorrow so there could be some semblance of order to their discussions. He found himself wishing for her presence at the meal, her calm lovely smile he knew would charm J. out of his focused self and lighten the rush and tension that infused their current dialogue. But she was elsewhere, at home with her children and her own and many preoccupations, though it was easy to imagine how much, at least for a little while, she might enjoy meeting someone new, someone she’d heard much about, someone really rather exotic and (it must be said) commanding and handsome. He would probably charm her as much as he knew she would charm J.

J. was all and more beyond his guest’s thought-description. He had an intensity and a confidence that came from being in company with intense, confident and, it had to be said, very wealthy individuals. His origins, his beginnings his guest and old friend could only guess at, because they’d never discussed it. The time was probably past for such questions. But his guest had his own ideas, he surmised from a chanced remark that his roots were not amongst the affluent. He had been a free-jazz musician from Poland who’d made waves in the German jazz scene and married the daughter of an arts journalist who happened to be the wife of the CEO of a seriously significant media empire. This happy association enabled him to get off the road and devote himself to educating himself as a composer of avant-garde art music - which he desired and which he had achieved. His guest remembered J’s passion for the music of Luigi Nono (curiously, a former resident of the city in which J. now lived) and Helmut Lachenmann, then hardly known in the UK. J. was already composing, and with an infinite slowness and care that his guest marvelled at. He was painstakingly creating intricate and timbrally experimental string quartets as well as devising music for theatre and experimental film. But over the past fifteen years J. had become increasingly more obsessed with devising software from which his musical ideas might emanate. And it had been to his guest that, all that time ago, J. had turned to find a generous guide into this world of algorithms and complex mathematics, a composer himself who had already been seduced by the promise of new musical fields of possibility that desktop computer technology offered.

In so many ways, when it came to the hard edge of devising solutions to the digital generation of music, J. was now leagues ahead of his former tutor, whose skills in this area were once in the ascendant but had declined in inverse proportion to J’s, as he wished to spend more time composing and less time investigating the means through which he might compose. So the guest was acting now as a kind of Devil’s Advocate, able to ask those awkward disarming questions creative people don’t wish to hear too loudly and too often.

And so it turned out during the next few hours as J. got out some expensive cigars and brandy, which his guest, inhabiting a different body seemingly, now declined in favour of bottled water and dry biscuits. His guest, who had been up since 5.0am, finally suggested that, if he was to be any use on the morrow, bed was necessary. But when he got in amongst the Egyptian cotton sheets and the goose down duvet, sleep was impossible. He tried thinking of her, their last walk together by the sea, breakfast à deux before he left, other things that seemed beautiful and tender by turn . . . But it was no good. He wouldn’t sleep.

The house could have been as silent as the excellent double-glazing allowed. Only the windows of the attic studio next door to his bedroom were open to the night, to clear the room of the smoke of several cigars. He was conscious of that continuous flow of traffic and machine noise that he knew would only subside for a brief hour or so around 4.0am. So he went into the studio and pulled up a chair in front of the painting by Cézanne, in front of this painting of a woodland scene. There were two intertwining arboreal forms, trees of course, but their trunks and branches appeared to suggest the kind of cubist shapes he recognized from Braque. These two forms pulled the viewer towards a single slim and more distant tree backlit by sunlight of a late afternoon. There was a suggestion, in the further distance, of the shapes of the hills and mountains that had so preoccupied the artist. But in the foreground, there on the floor of this woodland glade, were all the colours of autumn set against the still greens of summer. It seemed wholly wrong, yet wholly right. It was as comforting and restful a painting as he could ever remember viewing. Even if he shut his eyes he could wander about the picture in sheer delight. And now he focused on the play of brush strokes of this painting in oils, the way the edge and border of one colour touched against another. Surprisingly, imagined sounds of this woodland scene entered his reverie - a late afternoon in a late summer not yet autumn. He was Olivier Messiaen en vacances with his perpetual notebook recording the magical birdsong in this luminous place. Here, even in this reproduction, lay the joy of entering into a painting. Jeanette Winterson’s plea to look at length at paintings, and then look again passed through his thoughts. How right that seemed. How very difficult to achieve. But that night he sat comfortably in J’s attic and let Cézanne deliver the artist’s promise of a world beyond nature, a world that is not about constant change and tension, but rests in a stillness all its own.
Nigel Morgan Nov 2012
1
 
Here’s a sunny card to cheer up your hospital room.
Kate’s Flowers c. 1936 by Winifred Nicholson
So glad you’ve got your own room
And can therefore do a bit more of what you want to.
Take it easy though!

 
This painting is not what it seems.
Taking the long long look
that Jeanette Winterson recommends
there’s this abundance of orange
and its close friend yellow:
plenty and laughter
joining hands with
wisdom and calm.
Sometimes known as Kate’s Bunch
It’s an oil on plywood,
painted in Paris.
Two vases, daffodils and lilies,
the latter’s petals fallen on
a polished table, mahogany possibly,
and spread about by a gust of wind,
or perhaps a passing child. Kate
her first born, her miracle child
just seven when this painting was made.
 
2
 
There, sitting in front of us
in the stalls in the Town Hall,
was Stockhausen himself,
resplendent in the orange jumper
he always seemed to wear
in the last years of his life.

Because he invariably wore
white shirts and white jeans
an orange jumper, scarf
and jacket seemed sensible
garb for an angel from Sirius,
particularly when working in his garden.
At a concert he’d been known
to sport a purple scarf.
Orange and purple:
two colours that defy rhyme
but clearly not the reason
of this genius from another planet.
  
3
 
This Orange is Ecstatic.
Its theme of six quick notes,
almost never leaves the music.

Composer Michael Torke
slows it down, smooths it out,
it’s so quick and catchy
momentum builds up quickly;
it simply sounds (almost) unstoppable.
It sure is! Such fun,
and so good to listen to
because you never loose the thread.
Ok, the tune cycles round your head
but the instruments change
and there’s lots of extra tunes
playing away like good buddies.
This is music you can’t help smiling to.
It’s Ecstatic and Orange.

4
 
Did you know there’s a Music of Colour?
It is so new that few people,
except those who are creating it,
are aware that it exists.

At all.
 
Colour has seven degrees
of depth intensity.
With Orange it's
Alabaster
Apricot
Fire
Fox
Copper
Tobacco
Black coffee
 
Colour has seven degrees
between the shade of its hue
to its neutralization.
With orange it's
flame
sand
ochre
bistre
fawn
dun
mud
 
Oh Winifred, have you any idea
of the song your colours sing?
How orange and yellow
and blue and white
and almost purple
with a little green
make music become a picture.
 
5
 
I bought some orange tights! X
Oh Gosh! X
I’m not wearing them though . . . X
There’s a time and place for orange tights . . .
wait for (poetic) instructions please . . . X
Curiouser and curiouser . . . X

 
You see I bought this frock
in a charity shop.
Folly green and Pointing white
it was pleasantly patterned,
though a small fourteen,
and knowing he’d like it
I put it on one night
before we went to bed.
And he said:
‘You know it would be just right
with a pair of orange tights.’
And so it is.
Just right.

6

Dearest,
don’t let me touch you
yet, above the knee
where this warm colour
flows towards that centre
of your movements’ grace,
where lower limbs join
to kiss and stroke each inner thigh,
those quiet smooth planes of softest skin
that inviting so the caress of a hand,
daring so the intimate touch of a cheek.
Let orange keep you close to the possibility of passion
to the glow of your beauty’s length and line
where the firmness of your standing self
will shine out and speak of purpose
and of love’s sweet gift.
Composers often use quotation and/or sampling. In these six poems I've used short extracts variously from a get well card, a newspaper article, an Internet review, an essay by an artist and a text exchange. These extracts are always marked in italics.
Ek die lieplapper
Fladder in die wind
Soos ń herfs betaste blaar
Wat in die dwarrelwinde
Tolbos en die reels
Van swaartekrag verag

My kop is op ń blok gesit
Soos die twee vir ń stywers
Wat inner kompaste volg
Na waar die hart mag lei
Sterk oppad na iewers
Maar word deur nikse
En nerense verlydelik gefly

My V formasie vervorm
, vlieg vêr vooruit
Tot waar ek sig verloor
Van veilige jolheid.
Ek verkoop my vryvlieg siel
Aan die voëlwip en sy wag
Onbewus van die somer
Wat oor die waters op my wag.

Ekt my siel verkoop aan
Die winterson...
Prysgegee, môre se geluk
Die stofwolk op die Horison

Môre trap jy oor my
Windverstrooide oorblyfsels
En neurie ń afskeidslied
In jou binnenste.
Jy koester dalk ń traan
Of twee.
Vir die gees van ń
herfsblaar lieplapper
Wat in selfverwyt besterwe
Llahi Fuego Nov 2013
My muse, my muse,
She’s here right now
She just took a shower and her hair is still wet.
She's wearing a bathrobe, she walks up to the bed and sits
When she crosses one leg over the other I catch a flash of her thighs
Inviting thighs, long legs
She has pretty feet
And pretty ankles,
I always look at feet.
She has delicate wrists
She has long thumbs, here she is
Now leafing through a magazine
With those long thumbs,
Long fingernails.
Her shoes are on the floor, shoes that she wore last night
They've fallen over on the carpet,
My eyes find my way back to her
She seems to have found something interesting in the magazine
Here she is, concentrated on it, her back is straight
In this light, this natural light,
Without make up,
She looks impossibly lovely,
Renoir would paint her.

I get out of bed and walk into the shower.

There’s something strangely intimate
About taking a shower in a girl’s bathroom,
Shampoo bottles and hair conditioners all around me
Water cascading down my bare chest
Recollecting and replaying scenes from the night before:
Unbuttoning her jeans, pulling them off
Seeing her Hello Kitty underwear
And laughing, and thinking it was cute
And saying, umm… so how old are you again?
Humour always works, yes, humour always works.

I love ******* this girl.
It seems as though I'm always ******* her.
At night in the living room, on the sofa
Unfastening her stockings and slowly rolling them off,
Next her skirt, then her underwear…
Sweet parting flesh
I begin thinking of how it’ll be, how it’ll go down

She's always in something classy,
But man, it seems as though I'm always ******* her.
Sometimes I strip everything off her body,
But I ask her to leave her earrings and heels on; they confirm her nakedness
Hoop earrings
Red lipstick
Red heels
I lie in the middle of the bed, lights are dim, she climbs onto the bed
Curls up between my legs, begins by kissing on my stomach...
Great lovers lie in hell, the poet says.
Great lovers lie in hell.

I'm falling asleep afterwards, but not her
*** invigorates me, she says, tying her hair in a ponytail
This girl, she has the effect of lighting a matchstick in the dark.
She lays beside me and begins to read Jeanette Winterson
And just before I succumb to a deep slumber I remember something and tell her,
*Baby, baby, baby, your Morse code interferes with my heartbeat.
Donall Dempsey Sep 2019
THE BELL GOES FOR THE END OF HISTORY

her head all algebra
trigonometry and Heaney
and...boys...boys...boys

her mind crept
nearer & nearer...him
longing just to touch his...

she watched a trickle of sweat
make its way down his neck
imagined herself licki..ing...it...off

it is the end of WW1
thank heaven for that
she watches him....mmmm...stretch...yawn

his name surrounded
by doodled hearts and flowers
her first poem....ahem...HYMN TO HIM

she had eyes only for him
he had eyes only for Siobhan Winterson
she hated Siobhan Winterson

oh my God oh my God oh
he just looked. . .
. . .past me

oh please oh please oh please
look at me
he doesn't give her a second look

she cries herself asleep
dreams of him
requiting her unrequited love

years years later
two kids and a divorce later
HYMN TO HIM in a battered shoebox

she reads her
13 year old self
sobs her heart out
James Rives Apr 2019
Emeralds and diamonds,
Affairs of State.
We didn’t build our bridges
simply to avoid walking
on water.
A bridge is a meeting place.
Neutral, casual.
A bridge is a possibility,
a metaphor of chances.
For the traffix in whispered
goods, where else but a bridge
in the night?
A philosophical people,
conversant with greed and desire,
holding hands with the Devil and God.
This living bridge is tempting,
you may lose your soul
or find it here.

*an erasure poem
An erasure poem after a page from Jeanette Winteron's The Queen of Spades.
Kai Relota May 2015
“The tower is my body, the cage is my skull, and the spirit singing to comfort itself is me. But I am not comforted, I am alone. **** me.”
Sexing The Cherry - Jeannette Winterson

The boy who came from the sea was born
In 1989 with eleven hyenas and a powdered grace and an IV in one of
Those sad street lights

One mid-morning all the neon light flickering from last night’s
Tired and under-sexed collision of bodies on mercury.

The mother beget the sea while she was dancing and
All the exotic and fancy things that come with it

Is written on the newspaper
She dangled back and forth in the chandelier while giving birth and a gun in her
Hand: the whole world was in her hands.

Blood and flesh debris are pink as shore and pale as rubies like
Exploding stars.
People begin to ask you: “How’d you stay alive?”

The mother’s nightly arrival at that city burns the sorrows of all the light bulbs:
“Help me please” typed on a marquee.

If you sing the birth of your death, everyone will sing: lie down, don’t cry be alive again.

The sea born seemingly dead already returning back to hell, only can be restored by
The mother’s lovingly touch but the touch of hers burns the sea
When she is barely warm.

Cold-hearted angels will rescue you and you’ll be free-
Only for tonight.
The sea, sized milk carton box and the mother drives south this year.
People filled to watch the sea but it radiates they can’t be near you.
No one will save you.
Donall Dempsey Sep 2018
THE BELL GOES FOR THE END OF HISTORY

her head all algebra
trigonometry and Heaney
and...boys...boys...boys

her mind crept
nearer & nearer...him
longing just to touch his...

she watched a trickle of sweat
make its way down his neck
imagined herself lick..ing...it...off

it is the end of WW1
thank heaven for that
she watches him....mmmm...stretch...yawn

his name surrounded
by doodled hearts and flowers
her first poem....ahem...HYMN TO HIM

she had eyes only for him
he had eyes only for Siobhan Winterson
she hated Siobhan Winterson

oh my God oh my God oh
he just looked. . .
. . .past me

oh please oh please oh please
look at me
he doesn't give her a second look

she cries herself asleep
dreams of him
requiting her unrequited love

years years later
two kids and a divorce later
HYMN TO HIM in a battered shoebox

she reads her
13 year old self
sobs her heart out
Donall Dempsey Sep 2022
THE BELL GOES FOR THE END OF HISTORY

her head all algebra
trigonometry and Heaney
and...boys...boys...boys

her mind crept
nearer & nearer...him
longing just to touch his...

she watched a trickle of sweat
make its way down his neck
imagined herself lick..ing...it...off

it is the end of WW1
thank heaven for that
she watches him....mmmm...stretch...yawn

his name surrounded
by doodled hearts and flowers
her first poem....ahem...HYMN TO HIM

she had eyes only for him
he had eyes only for Siobhan Winterson
she hated Siobhan Winterson

oh my God oh my God oh
he just looked. . .
. . .past me

oh please oh please oh please
look at me
he doesn't give her a second look

she cries herself asleep
dreams of him
requiting her unrequited love

years years later
two kids and a divorce later
HYMN TO HIM in a battered shoebox

she reads her
13 year old self
sobs her heart out
Donall Dempsey Sep 2017
THE BELL GOES FOR THE END OF HISTORY

her head all algebra
trigonometry and Heaney
and...boys...boys...boys

her mind crept
nearer & nearer...him
longing just to touch his...

she watched a trickle of sweat
make its way down his neck
imagined herself licki..ing...it...off

it is the end of WW1
thank heaven for that
she watches him....mmmm...stretch...yawn

his name surrounded
by doodled hearts and flowers
her first poem....ahem...HYMN TO HIM

she had eyes only for him
he had eyes only for Siobhan Winterson
she hated Siobhan Winterson

oh my God oh my God oh
he just looked. . .
. . .past me

oh please oh please oh please
look at me
he doesn't give her a second look

she cries herself asleep
dreams of him
requiting her unrequited love

years years later
two kids and a divorce later
HYMN TO HIM in a battered shoebox

she reads her
13 year old self
sobs her heart out
Donall Dempsey Sep 2023
THE BELL GOES FOR THE END OF HISTORY

her head all algebra
trigonometry and Heaney
and...boys...boys...boys

her mind crept
nearer & nearer...him
longing just to touch his...

she watched a trickle of sweat
make its way down his neck
imagined herself lick..ing...it...off

it is the end of WW1
thank heaven for that
she watches him....mmmm...stretch...yawn

his name surrounded
by doodled hearts and flowers
her first poem....ahem...HYMN TO HIM

she had eyes only for him
he had eyes only for Siobhan Winterson
she hated Siobhan Winterson

oh my God oh my God oh
he just looked. . .
. . .past me

oh please oh please oh please
look at me
he doesn't give her a second look

she cries herself asleep
dreams of him
requiting her unrequited love

years years later
two kids and a divorce later
HYMN TO HIM in a battered shoebox

she reads her
13 year old self
sobs her heart out

— The End —