Shell

Well the news is in, and we are stunned to find it's not good at all. The tumour count has risen dramatically since August. It's hard to react except with disbelief, but there is an edge of fear there too. And 'here we go again'. I had been so sure I was improving my stamina and well being. Appointments with various docs start tomorrow, I hope to know more then. To take our minds off it all, we had a day in Chichester while the car was being serviced, nice lunch, finished the Christmas shopping and got all gifts and awkward/overseas cards posted. A good day, considering.

A few years ago we were at the Pallant House Gallery and saw, over the grand staircase, an amazing piece of work by Susie MacMurray. Pallant House later purchased this lovely smaller version which is now on permanent display. It's in a more intimate setting and beautifully lit. Mussel shells and velvet mounted on black card. I was delighted to see it again, especially as the Poet in Residence wrote about it, very evocatively, in 2007.

Shell

Gone now, though the memory is here:
an absence on the wide, waxed flight of stairs,
their nudity half-panelled to the chest,
and silence measured by a hallway clock
whose habit knocks anxiety from the air.

A feast of empties echoed hungry mouths
that shucked the flesh from violated shell:
the snapped shut wife prized open night on night,
the sexual feasting she could live without,
The blood red velvet intimate as hell.

You can cut yourself on a mussel: black and blue,
the oily ink of waters late at night
that swallow sailors put to sleep by drink;
a wife who dreams of how he’d slip and sink,
which knuckles struck her blurring with decay.

The wealth of love wasted between these walls
curses the air to leave the hall bewitched,
the heart’s long muscle slippered into two,
the stairs she dreaded to ascend now shadowed
by twenty thousand pairs of broken lips.


Ros Barber 2007