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What is the one painting where you are invited without salaciousness, to look up the lifted skirts of a woman, where the soft darkness in the crook of her thighs is straightforward promise, not concealment?
Deep, transparent blacks and browns, a wet brush laying soft shadow of thigh and chin so your eye travels via every twist of his wrist, every folded lift and lay of her white shift, lit like alabaster to hold the glow of her body,
while she looks down in the water, more simple than any annunciation.
‘Why don’t you come in with me?’ asks Else, Frances’ Ma. ‘You’ve got the shrewdest eye’.
Lily has run the gauntlet, past Belgian, gallery owning Ma, and clever, lawyer Pa, past the collective gulp at her Lincolnshire accent, lack of saving pretension, past the learning of pesto and pasta, past dinner parties, Frances’ university chums, linguistics, semiotics, hermeneutics, radical lesbian feminist politics, gender archaeology, the price of really good bread, past ‘don’t you want to broaden your horizons?’ ‘What, are you slumming or something?’ into the cold, plain, thirst-slaking waters of enough.
and taken up their places in the museum on glass shelves, in long rows, one after the other, after the other.
Each has a little boy baby, each achieves therefore, what women should, lucky, lucky long-skirted virgins.
From the chunky, rough hewn twelfth century, to the rococo, smiling or weeping they seem comfortable
in their borrowed power from god and the master carver, armies of them stuffed with a piquant male
fantasy of prayer. Look over your shoulder at all the tortured Christ’s, their sufferings so elegantly drawn, as if
suffering is the dandyish option, an elite occupation. Then quickly, turn back to the virgins. Was that a foot withdrawn
under a cloak? Is that ineffable smile a tinge ironic? See, that one – there, I swear she spanked Him – and that one
cries real tears of fury and frustration over her dead son’s wasted breath. An escaped smile, a small, weary
hint of reality in lip or cheek, even the man with the chisel, dreaming of Jesus can’t negate the power of all the virgins coming in.
Ga maar lekker slapen, you say. It’s 4 am. I have been standing on a blue dock. Ice lights in the water. A ship against the quay
is rumbling in its guts. Steel threads run to the lip of the gang plank. A freight wagon rolls to the edge,
unstoppable as coals down a chute. I know it is full of my sins. I make myself
look at its logo, hoping it’s in Cyrillic, something I can’t read. It’s the turning away
that creates furrows in our bed. When morning comes and I open one saurian eye, I see
your collar bones arrow together as you bend. In one hand a brown coffee mug, the other
wafting little pursed lips of fierce-smelling wake-up coffee steam towards my sleep.
If I said to you I need to be sorry you’d ask to whom, for what? since you have taught me
finally how to be kind. That’s just how it is, you would say.
Ga maar lekker slapen.
I say my prayers to the cat I meet in the street thank you for letting me stroke you
I say my prayers to the bird with a kind eye thank you for not noticing
I need to hear your song I say my prayers to the old woman in a red hood
grimly planting her zimmer thank you thank you it’s all possible, isn’t it?
keeping on keeping on to the leaf in its flame of dying
thank you such a naked moment you let me see
I say my prayers to our piano your hand strokes it every day
its bright white keys smiling smiling every time
hammers and wires and felt must sing.
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