It was still that Sunday several months ago at the Harnham monastery in the north of England, and because of the noise from the washing machine upstairs it was almost impossible for someone outside in the corridor to hear anything that was being said in the main reception room at the front of the house:
This once, I walked across
the corner of the room
with her, my right hand
around her waist,
gently open, her right hand
inviting, cupping mine,
a tango, and more than one
– Ecce
As a mother holds her
child,
whispering what he cannot
hear,
asleep, nor she tell what
it is he dreams
//
If I had been able to
reconstruct the diagonal, it would have been like this; four or five cords made
of metal or gut, fanning out like rays and strung taut from wall to wall, the
ends bolted into the masonry; and a bridge between, two or three curved
rectangular metal sheets, or wood, with one a sounding board, or whatever it
was conceived to be, with a large circle cut out close to its centre.
- Ecce
Her eyes almost closed,
the shadow of her arms
falls over her womb, and
the
long folds of her deep red
dress over the rise
of her hidden body
//
One way of reading the
fragment by Simonides of Keos 598 (PMG) – IT IS A FACT THAT AMONG THE WAITING
WORLD OF THINGS THE VISIBLE CONSTANTLY CONSTRAINS; in the State Hermitage on
the 15th of June 1985, the entire central area of a major painting by Rembrandt
began to slide towards the floor, the layers of paint liquefying and piling
themselves up in what were later called ‘vertical crustations’, some large
spots and splashes being left almost entirely without colour.
“It works”, he said from
the front room
where the people were sat
listening to him,
the words rising up to meet
the lip
like a gleaming shower of
gold,
above the
ruined buildings,
and the still waters of the mill pond below.
And the sounds were having to bounce accross the threshold of the room.
mmj