Empty Frames

They float on their backs

Touching gently in the tile-framed pond

No hands to wipe the needles out of their eyes

As they follow clouds, crossing the sky

Warm wind from the sea, cool wind from the hills

Shaded by branches arching low from the larch.

 

He’d fanned them out like a hand of cards

Faces up on an apple green baize

His first day, with eyes still closed

Day 3 – still unwell, 6 months, 4 years

All lazing on surface weed

As if on a lawn in the autumn sun.

He imagined foxes stepping on them like stones

On their way over the wall, into their home

Sinking, screeching at the water cool

And the sight of eyes below, frustrating the crows.

Once pressed they are swallowed by shadowy sludge

Blanket weed a metre deep, ravenous hair, netted green.

 

Raindrops fall into their open smiles

Weighing them down as bubbles rise

In seconds they dissolve

His stick cannot find them!

He’ll have to change his wet clothes

Or she’ll guess where he’s been

And know about the faces in the pond.

……………………….

Photos are not me acting as a god

As creator of a baby or the people I pass

I don’t seek to clasp souls in my hands

To cage the essence of life in a frame behind glass.

All mothers cherish photos of their child

Day 1, Day 3 – still unwell

6 months, 4 years – Me holding him high.

 

To lose them, have a burglar steal them

To find them torn of a face no longer loved

And sent spinning in space

Like a severed limb, no longer warm

Tears that moment in time

Once preserved, now purged.

……………………….

I came home from the shop

And saw my son by the pond

A note on the study door read

“They might one day be returned”

Books? I stepped in

Every frame whimpered, feverish with loss.

Blood was splashed up the walls

By surgery smashing up frames.

Tinnitus rebounded from shaking shelves

Silent screams fell with glass to the floor.

 

Every photo of mother and baby

Him as a toddler and growing child

Gone from the tops of bookcases and my desk below

I don’t have other copies,

They weren’t photos on a phone

Relatives, now distant, threw theirs long ago.

 

This is not a test, not a phase,

A teenage rage soon to pass.

The boy becomes man and rejects the mother.

A thousand times he will wound me

For the divorce he pleaded against

But I could not prevent

For the Covid lockdown and terror of the news

For the predicted eventuality of just we two.

 

Now the shutters are bolted, both doors are locked

Insects feed on the dust and pages

Of that room, abandoned like a lifetime’s stage

After the final curtain

Stripped of cherubs, high in the gods.

 

His note threatened consequences

What more should I fear?

My spirit cast out in the universe of time

Choking on blanket weed

Driven mad by those smiles

That had radiated such love

To the life I cared for, and fought for

Several times nearly died for

Grown to bury me alive in an empty frame.

…………………….

A month has passed, time heals and I stand before you

Both as gallery and picture at an exhibition,

We are all of us treasures in Mussorgsky frames.

All that I am, all I have done in this life

Is moulded and painted here, layer upon layer.

 

This body is the frame for my memories

Ringed in cells of carbon and chalk

Every cut, every break, the demise of every child

Every love, every grief etched and preserved

Not as evidence for the angels

It is my spirit they know

Rather my own story, I fear I’ll one day forget.

 

My face alone shows a lifetime’s events

More perhaps than the ballet

That deformed hips, chiselled arches

These quarries under eyes, mined deep by tears

And mouth now pinched, smile felled by grief.

 

This external frame mirrors the walls of my heart

Open as an organ playing into the frames of clouds

Echoing my legends through the frames of trees

To be mirrored again by their roots, deep underground.

 

I was wrong to mourn the loss of those photos

2D, captured through the eyes of strangers

My memories are within me

In every cell, muscle and bone

Framed by this body

Framing this body, and all that I am.

(Tracey will read this poem aloud at the Chichester Festival Theatre Words Out Late event on Friday 19 April 2024)

 

 

 

Tracey Chippendale-Gammell
Picture Nick Victor

 

 

 

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