Wordsworth's Life Mask

Inspired by Wordsworth's life mask

by James Patton

Are these the eyes through which the torrent of light and things older than men and the new-born newly sprung wells of French blood flowed? You are shut, lids sunk like melted-over caves. We all know, watching, peering into this cast which touched cast which touched skin, and will never let another breath in, that you are only plaster, only a mass of clay. And yet that sagged mouth, those lids bulbously pregnant with centuries-sleep, so undulant, half-inflated like a bladder. You are plaster but you are too ugly to be art. And as a photograph could almost whir into a film with a shake, those lids, those flaps of skin want to wobble into a burp, a slurpy cough, blinking plaster from these eyes, picking it out of your nose. I want to fling you just to see you break, to kill this thing less perfect than human, less and sickeningly more than your ivory-tower self.

 

Untitled

Inspired by Marlene Rolfe’s 1997 oil painting, ‘Kitchen Table’

by Angela Lui

We always eat our eggs sunny side up,

Little yellow smiles on shiny white plates,

Catalogue-cut colours, designed to please

The lazy camera or unfocused lens;

 

The cherries on that vinyl tablecloth

You bought because you thought it homey,

Bright red like bloodlust, or a mockery;

Cherries are not my favourite fruit.

 

I touch your empty cup and feel how wrong

Two lives can look plugged side by side –

Then scrub it hard, watch soap suds burst,

For fear of falling down the drain

 

For fear of seeing truth in distant eyes,

In crimson cracks wherein we drop;

Wrought not from words, their lustre lost,

But from disdain and utter loneliness

 

Which strip down through the paint and we

Are left with black and white; our eggshell life

On which we try to paste our happy snaps

Snaps.

Bronze, Morgante, the court dwarf

Inspired by Giambologna's 'Morgante'

by Susanna Langsdale

Achondroplastic bandiness:
porcine belly –
such a funny little bronze, not like us!
Simone has bemoaned our immanency,
matter of blood and roots.
We are fecund as the soil
but there is no gold in seed bearers!
Let’s don artful gold masks
and try to be dutiful wearers!
We should suck, lick, gorge on big toes
(pushed through holes in the gold)
from the auriferous feet of the Duke.

Let’s mock Morgante!
Lost wax! Malfatto! Deformed!
Fruitless in gold:
he is as beast in bronze,
a woman? –
but his lips are not lush, babe;
his hips, doll, are not swell;
and he does not like your jokes one bit.
Not a woman then? –
“He is bronze” Etruria roars.
“No mask for him” the Duke proclaims
“But gold masks for all the bronzen women.”

Cup and spigot, but no mask for Morgante,
for a freak is cast, luckily, in bronze.

 

Dead Presidents

Inspired by a Denarius

by Sam Gould

I think you were weak and you stumbled upon an act that became a tragedy that became yours...raised around the very daggers that took from you your father

et tu Brutus? he quips and CLAP

off goes the very gun that’s aimed squarely at your jaws

aimed at Lee Harvey Brutus and worse than a gun or a dagger

a thing that can freeze time

trapped in the moment that’s his not yours

you become a character with tragic flaws

for Shakespeare

and like Gavril Princip,

you’ve got TB in Vienna,

no torture but

no way to go for a regicide.

you think

that you’re a moment

just a moment

and a moment cannot hide.

 

the metal captures you in time, in the house in March that became murder that became

more...in its metal the shock that was your own blood in the presidential

et tu Brutus? he exclaims and BAM

you’re done for eternity and the Republics a sham

bringing Antony and worse than loverboy

Octavian, Augustus

‘they’ve forgotten us’

whispers Princip as he dies of cold in a cell

no way to go for a regicide

but you’re a moment

just a moment

and a moment cannot hide.

 

Fragile Villanelle

Inspired 'L'Umana fragilità' by Salvator Rosa

by Paul Merchant

 

It's not the done thing, these days -

the skeleton, its sharp grip, black wings.

We have, of course, our tasteful modern ways:

 

no arcane symbols, quivering dust or haze

clouding the stone, the earth unmasked at dying.

It's not the done thing, these days.

 

With plague on the doorstep, an image says

even the painted won't slip the skull's grin.

We have, of course, our tasteful modern ways:

 

preferring, say, a flickering light or gaze

at a starved, extinguished television screen.

Darkness isn't done, these days -

 

electric distance twists contrast into greys.

We don't see the painter's tears, his wife transposed within.

Instead, we have our tasteful modern ways:

 

we've scrubbed out the shadow, smoothed all past the stage

of colours and frames, life's earthy din.

Death's not the done thing, these days -

we have, of course, our tasteful modern ways.