Claire Crowther
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
He decomposed in dreams –
his face and life turned apple
left behind my back door at Christmas.
Found at Easter. The gist,
Physicist Goes To The Bad,
misted pith and seed into my eyes
till aha, I had there
the full drama. Brain as screen
of docudeterioration.
Then I delved fingers through
his sweat-light head, applied my
virtuceuticals. I just thought drug,
started imagining
lavender mind-fixer for
attacks of trembling words. Non-science.
RESTRICTED VIEW, DRESDEN
Fifty feet below me in Our Lady’s basilica,
the conductor walks in unseen
by us up here
and players stand in respect for arms that remember sleights
of composition. His patterns
and their outcomes,
exactly as he predicts, are so close that you can’t hear
space between baton and prelude
although music
recognises difference between us and painted saints
who hold a body-unburdened
cross. And between
the heaps of half-wall left here in the name of postwar peace
and these new walls. Their label-shaped
plaques have no names.
Now, one by one, we stand up. This is not an accolade;
we can’t go on imagining
the conductor
from these slits of seats. Rising to see the concert, between
our histories, I think of rubble-
women cleaning
the broken parts of bulwarks. Bach. We have had to clean each
our own church-worth of displaced stones.
Pick up each brick.
Copyright © Claire Crowther 2016
Claire Crowther’s third collection, On Narrowness, was published in 2015 by Shearsman and her pamphlet, Silents, also in 2015, was published by Hercules Editions. She has just finished 12 months as poet in residence at the Royal Mint Museum. Her work has appeared in Molly Bloom 3 and 5.