Geraldine Clarkson: England's Girlfriends, or Chantage

All the pretty months leading up to the prison escape had been wasted; the angels and their wives saddening. A child breeze playing through the bars. Flesh has failed, the portly warder tells me over toast in solitary. A meat-madman in the main block is looking for a higher-shaped community. He has sources—scuttlebutts—who tell me that my squeeze on the outside is straying, seduced by propinquity, by spicy oxters, though I write to her daily, from the brink, my pen quivering, my heart intent. A lad and a ladder, all it took. I need a gaudy-moon psychiatrist, the neurons in my head popping before breakfast. There are parasimilarities. My spirit flirts with the status quo. You’re going to hop good, my supplier says. April is absent, as far as June. Hardyness abounds, unmistakeable, becomes excruciating. A grave and letter lost. I am hyper-Hardy, all statins and stains and dreams of satin. Two months, maybe three, short of bliss.

Penelope Shuttle: my very early path

when I was a child

I wanted to be a venerable old man

loved and respected by all,

a scholar perhaps, or one who travelled the world

doing no harm, had I seen him on the telly?

perhaps that old man spoke

of battle elephants, he was very wise

also, when I was a child

I loved the wren in his noble dusky robe

to this very day he dabbles in half-mourning

he has many cock-nests

he’s loud as a shooting star

he spruces up the sky

note by note

or is alarmed chack chack chack

as I continue along my very early path

green air unfolding its mystery play

everything becoming rivery:

I’m bringing you my portable omphalos and my ardour

I am bringing tales of my old people for luck

wren is token-wing a wide-spread bird

meanwhile a red cardigan is hard at work

in the very bosom of things bestowing love

and taking it away from the girl

who wished for flight quicker than silver

wanted to be a winterling

once found on a farthing

weighing no more than a pound coin

upon which the queen’s profile claims precedence

James McGonigal

In translation

Whisper across the river. They speak

a different dialect over there

and can’t tell what the words mean

when you shout.

Quietness carries over water. Raindrops,

seepage, a confluence where pebbles click.

All of that’s a second coinage, their currents

run silver.

So, lightly – but not monotone.

Trees on the far bank take all weathers seriously

and reckon passing minutes on each hand.

Don’t distract them.

Whisper back across the river.

Say something about yourself: how you came

to be standing on this shore, your good ear

bent in their direction.

David Kinloch

Crossings

Oh, I went down to paradise! To paradise on my chubby knees, crawling over the plush towards the window. Who knew a window could also be a door, a door that opened on a wrought iron spiral staircase and that I could enlace my baby feet among its green and rusty whorls, going down to the paradise below. Yes, I went down to paradise, spray in the seaside ozone and I sniffed it like a dog, snuffled it like my woollen donkey, Neddy, abandoned among the filigrees of those high steps. No need of helping hands! I can make the paradise alone, my tiny palms warmed by the sunlit metal as it ferries me down to heaven. ‘Heaven’s above, he’s made it on his own!’, down in the paradise below.

And there, through a narrow gate, were the trellises of raspberries, green hairy canes armed with prickles, aggregates of druplets clustering in profusion and this tall, behatted woman, face hidden in a bee-hat handing me down the fruits of paradise, sweet, tart in equal measure. This woman whom I knew as mother, my other self, longer than my arms and legs, as soft as my cheeks, softer than the soles of my feet naked in grass and among the flowers of the field.

But paradise is sound as well as scent and vision. I was fascinated by the hollow noise of those wooden steps that led up from the sitting room to the French doors. My whole body was a tuning fork, intimately attuned to that change from muffled tread to air filled ascent. It was like a premonition of flight, of the wings that suddenly crossed my sight, and if I could only get into that shut-in nothingness maybe I could fly it out, out of the window-doors and fly myself down to paradise. Even better, when I got there, I discovered more abandoned and autonomous steps, once used to assist ladies into saddles, and they had metal handles so I could carry them through my paradise a little and climb up to the raspberries and be among their scented juicyness.

And hell? Oh, hell was a ferry ride across the River Amstel, one of us with a lover dying of cancer, the other with a lover dead of Aids. We sought solace in each other’s grief and when he lay on me in the sauna his weight pressed down like the weight of the whole river we had crossed. Then we ate honey cake together, high in the gods, not speaking but watching the theatre of wharfs below us and all the huddled figures queuing like burning coals in the winter evening for the ride back to Amsterdam. We cannot cross this river together.// We cross this river. // Old hang-dog friend, we cannot return from the other side. // We return from the other side.

Both the eastern and western Renaissance offer great images of paradise and hell. There are canvases full of flowers and fountains and canvases thick with devils and the machinery of torture. One that moves and amuses most is by the Belgian artist, Joachim Patinir, who offers us a vision of both, paradise and hell separated by the river Styx which runs down the very middle of the painting, a blue hinge in a diptych. And in the middle of that middle there is Charon in a little boat, the Ferryman of the Underworld steering a human soul towards the banks of hell, their faces resolutely turned away from a solitary angel who waves at them from a slope in paradise.

The reference to art interrupts the writing out of hell. Because it must. It must. For there is mother again, lying in that final hospital bed. It’s deepest night, just the rasp of her breathing wracking the air, and how I long to escape that endless sound as it crosses me. But if I listen closely — half-sleeping, half-waking — is that not also the wash of the sea or the current of a troubled river; and I see her bed, frail ferry in the night-lit ward and reach out across the coiling sheets to stroke her snow-white hair, softer than any skin, my own, her own, our own.

Painted, spoken