Gaia.
Introduction Who is Gaia Holmes? Why am I illustrating? Prologue of sorts.
Constellations Somewhere in the middle of a poem you draw the shape of the plough on the stickleback ridges of my spine. There is no first line to explain the beginning. We start at the centre and our wicked history melts away like butter. Later we walk outside. The late air slaps us into sobriety and you stop me by the factory to point out the night’s constellations with your artist’s finger. I am not like you. I don’t need to give everything a title. I want to leave this open and as wide as the sky. There is no last line to explain the end. I want to see the stars as stars.
Charm He could charm the poison out of fox gloves and used his skills to quicken my heart. I wondered what he fed on: frayed liturgies and the secret dreams of women, toxic spores translated into messages of lust, slivers of the dank March sky rolled up like pickled herring. I never knew. He always skimmed me, left me hooked on some potent pollen, some sacrificial line, some cold gap between sentiments.
His fingers were like cathedrals, too big to untie my delicate knots yet he knew me inside out like he knew the names of flowers and bats and clouds, like he knew how to throw daggers without skewering the soul. He could sniff out creeping wolf-men and crack their backbones with a lazy wink, worked my fingers to his throat like a snake charmer, made me slide and arch with his singing breath. After we’d loved and I was doped up on glow he laid wet silver on my eyelids believing it would bring him luck.
The Banshees He heard the Banshees singing weeks before she died. Each night their cold blue keening stained his dreams, or in the day time one of their discordant notes would find him, get lodged in his body like a trapped wasp, somewhere between his heart and his brain. I tried to diffuse their mournful racket, trained myself to coo like a wood pigeon, breathe, like yeast expanding in proving dough, whisper, like the soft crackle of crocus shoots pushing through the crust of a bulb. I asked the wind to sing something gentle, told the moon to hum as it nosed its way through the dark, worked hard to raise the volume of our bodies as we loved: our hearts thumping, our blood roaring, our bones colliding. But on that day I had no song strong enough to hold them back. They came wailing, whey-faced, raw-eyed, stood at the end of the bed and sung him the long, demented opera of her death.
Desires We keep our desires in small cast-iron boxes with impenetrable locks, carry them with us wherever we go and they weigh us down, make our hearts feel like toothache. Sometimes sounds creep through the metal: bird song, slow ferns uncurling, rain on greenhouse glass. Sometimes when we’re not concentrating scents slip out of the miniscule cracks: crushed orange peel, fevers and hot summer skin.
Sometimes our desires are beyond our control, they make whirlwinds in their prisons, rock their boxes, scream for honey and fingertips. We try to ignore them, blush and fidget, smother them with our coats and talk about maths. Sometimes we’re cruel, we fill the bath and hold them under water until they stop babbling, deprive them of our dreams.
Wren Dennis www.cargocollective.com/thebirds