A SMALL ARTEFACT REMEMBERS LEIGHTON HOUSE
‘Hotel garni de l’infini
sphinx & joconde de defunct monde’
The price they paid for me I do not know
Only remember the day I left my master’s house
Crated in straw
To start another life outside
My hall of Iznic tiles, the fountain’s
Everlasting litany –
Against the terra cotta sky
I leapt for him with eyes of yellow
Topaz – and he spoke to me
As a man speaks to an animal
From a defunct world.
****
The models came, gave their consent,
A model’s nerve, to be studied
Like specimens, their plastic beauty played
By day or artificial arc
For the absorbed maker to explore
Strip naked or hang clothes on, each
Crease or crinkle caught by sinew
Linked to skeleton, stretched
By toned flesh. The models came and went
Having changed and been changed
From woman into character, fashioned
For trained or untrained eyes
To lap around.
And when they left,
The curving banister of lacquered ebony
Wasn’t for then. Their stairs, a narrow
Exit from a dream, brought up the level road
Back to the city where seasons baked
Or froze, streets bubbling with bad ends.
I saw the hopeful women
As they came and went, the space around
Each curve of shoulder or curl,
And watched the silences
Between the laughing words.
***
About the time the peacocks came
Hubbub of dust and builders shook the place;
There was a face he could not let go -
It was the look from those eyes that stayed all night,
And when the hall was finished
The sky became a memory, the blue-tiled
World of art more real than any other.
Down by the fountain we would wait for him,
She in her latest plunging dress
As the small hours expanded and dawn,
Fabled through coloured glass, broke free
Across the tapestry of tiles,
I, crouching behind the pillar still,
About to spring.
*****
