I Meet Your Friends at the Gallery Opening
and one asks how we met and the answer is Hinge, but I’m not sure
you want me saying so. Instead we have a back-and-forth of ums
and wells and he drops the question. We circle round displays
of plastic fruit, films of the sea projected on the walls, collages
of dogs in caravans, new-age hippy moon-gazing hares.
It’s the art of young people, it’s warm art, art unafraid to be
cute. Sometimes there’s something daring in being cute, lovely,
girlish. I think but don’t say this. A bad idea to share too many
thoughts with new people, too many chances to be trapped.
With mild regret I purchase several overpriced flutes of white,
stand around in circular groups while people who already know
each other do the talking. We’ve only met a few times. You hold
my hand and ask what I think of it all. I tell you that each time
we loop around, I’m scared I’ll knock the fruit down with my bag.
The Lady and the Unicorn
We saw it in Paris, an escape from the derelict Airbnb plastered
with signs warning of rats and lead paint. A mistake to book it
without scrolling to the one-star reviews, really. On one such
excursion, we found ourselves in a shadow-room of tapestry,
one taking up each wall, named after touch, smell and desire.
The robed woman and her horned companion at the centre
delighted in earthly pleasures of birdsong, perfume, mirrors.
In the background, various creatures floated without place or
dimension: dog, lamb, rabbits cleaning their paws, white as
a hare’s stomach, faultless among a thousand woven flowers.
With her falconer’s glove, the lady waited for wildness to find her.
We sat in the dark, studying the details, wondered where we’d next
bide time before braving the crumbling apartment again,
those sights and sounds and scents of earthly displeasure.
The Difficulty of Hare-Watching
Once you’ve found her
she’s gone
in a cartoon cloud
of smoke, her feet
conjuring dust
with a skedaddle
sound effect. Like that,
she becomes the space
that is not a hare.
Once you’ve found her,
she’s gone.
Painting a Blue Hare
and considering Picasso, who took time
between preying on teen girls
to capture the world’s sorrows,
poor widows and addicts.
My hare lives in different depths of
blue, her startled eye a rock pool,
her variations of fur a tumbling field.
My hare too is mournful, in her case
mourning what life could have been
if she were free to sit un-preyed upon.