1.
Shade, you:
bleached communicant
deep in introspective
communion.
Amorphous shape-shifter,
a muffled interlocutor
padding around,
flailing at ablutions.
As you slowly materialise,
a small mammal
burrows through your brain:
Thou hast nor youth nor age;
But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep,
Dreaming on both . . .
So you nurse your own
patient healing
in that twilight state,
snoozing through noon’s drift
like the sloth.
2.
Bruised fuselage
drying out;
fractured installation
tarrying for your
season of wholeness.
Waiting for the acidic
after-tastes to neutralise,
& those flavours to reify
on your etherised tongue.
You have a fatigue
deeper than Hades;
your calves have the
consistency of iron,
but you plough on
through the snow-fields,
attempt to cultivate
seeds of a lost fecundity.
Stumble through the
quotidian, as you nest
these enfeebled ashes.
Finally nudge through
your makeshift cocoon
as you assume
embryo of the Admiral.
3.
Cocoon-stirrer,
flaky substantive,
you who continue
to surprise us.
Your sickly well-being
has the beneficent retch
which purges.
As a tragedian plays
divine physician,
sublimates pity & terror
for cathartic purposes,
so you ply your craft
with a patient adroitness
which never disappoints.
You who are the midwife
coaxing out life
from the pain-site
of body putrescence.
Always splitting
the umbilical,
finely balanced
between the dead
& the quick.
For you always exist
in that grand state
of nascence: a one-woman
renaissance
emerging
from agony
of an incoherent age.
You who long ago
learnt the humble
arts of regeneration,
have always known
that the sanatorium
gone-to-seed
is, simultaneously,
the womb of fortitude.
*
You ur-shade you,
fumbling with your
morning-comb,
deep-set communicant,
commune now
with another
fleshed-out shade
who’s also bled through . . .
Mark Wilson
Painting Gwen John
Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), The Angel of History (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is also the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review and Le Zaporogue.