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