His foam white arms After Pierre Fouché

Lydia Trethewey

speak this story with the bite of a pin holding the pattern together.

tell me, without words with your fingers in cotton intricacies and loose hunger, pick the syllables from between the teeth of a frill shark. a sailor is seduced by the language of salt left on the lips afterwards, and brine-washed throats a mess hall rough like bone of a cuttlefish and soft like lace. he escapes as a limpet, clings to the littoral rush of tide and wind, hope unspools his longing in the small scales of a braided rhythm, white crests kelp-brown hull-green and blue, blue, blue. the tickle of spray on his unshaven cheeks how many days at sea before he falls for the undulating ribcage of an ocean which breathes, an ocean which speaks to him a promise so deep he cannot resist ocean in the guise of a young man their love, ornamented like the coarse skin of a sea urchin, red welts from the lash of waves in his wake, the sailor writhes a torture of last lights glimpses a silver sheen, ocean’s flesh like silk sheets, a demand to be touched behind shut eyes the sailor twines dreams from pillow-lace his lover rocks him to sleep in foam-white arms the peal of surging swells knocks the sides of his skull, his stowaway desire this ocean seeks to be inside speak from lungs water-logged and he can think of nothing more absolute, more perfect, than the seamless descent of a body submerged

Author’s note

It is difficult to see the delicate lace scroll of His foam white arms, pinned to an ocean black wall. I lean close, and walk the unspooled length. The form of the scroll suggests landscape as language, knowing through moving. Fouché, a laceworker, has transmuted to braids a fragment from Crosbie Garstin’s epic poem ‘The Ballad of the Royal Ann’, in which a young man falls in love with the sea, personified as another young man. As a poet, I re-thread this story into words, thinking on the common origin of text and textile.

Lydia Trethewey is a poet and artist based in Western Australia. Her work probes experiences of nascent queerness, focusing on the potential of ekphrasis to prompt solidarity with non-human beings. Her poems have appeared in various publications including Beyond Queer Words, The Ekphrastic Review, and Spineless Wonders. She is currently undertaking a PhD in poetry at Curtin University, where she works as a sessional academic in art. She completed her first PhD at Curtin in 2018, in visual art.