Gerrie Fellows
ROPE PIECE (The fact of form)
Were they intended these taut solids
as a steep-angled valley
made of air
the mind plays rope tricks with
the material shifting perspective
less solid than woodblock
a Chinese ink landscape of disappearance
illusion or a walking into
(as happens in that other
enclosed enfolded) space
plays with me
opens what I enter
Let's not call it landscape (that framed
viewpoint)
nor land which it is not
(though its echoes enclose me )
shifting on a surface among many
the mind going into
(Bill Bollinger, The Fruitmarket Gallery, October 2011-January 2012)
SHAPE-SHIFTERS (1)
Incomers on a grandiose street corner
wonder tilts our faces
to a sheer fall
of sheeting water
It might be self-cleaning glass
or an urban waterfall
in the form of a cursive script
a formation of steel and air transformed
in the sky's reflection transforming
leaks images
of what a window might show us
as if made of flickerings
our lives
in this city's
shades of shifting weather
SHAPE-SHIFTERS (2)
Visitors to an elegant, peopled square
our faces tilted to swifts in flight
the shrill, deft
describers of dark arabesques
above the perfect renaissance
plan of light
Wordless we watch them
chase high summer insects
in thunderstorm air in flight
too fast for sight
as if they could tell us
what unknowable
ungrounded
shape-shifters in another air
THE COMPLETE AND WONDERFUL THING
for Fi
On the radio a fragment from another time zone
a numeral on the Richter scale a cacophony of
silence
jams landlines all morning
multiplies in the ethernet's cloudy gaps
in empty inboxes in the blank cells of phones
on the screen across which a woman runs
in fast shutter/flying forward
beyond herself/
beyond the city collapsing
in the hubbub of lunchtime
or our sleep's slow motion nightmare of almost
and who is lost behind her
and where are our loved ones?
What was solid dissolves across a groundless field
a woman struggling
to reach her child
Hours later
the signal between us jagged
each aftershock a gap between syllables
two just while I've been talking
her voice
reassembles itself out of the dark
across space
complete and wonderful
into my afternoon's still ordinary light
Copyright Gerrie Fellows 2015
Gerrie Fellows' most recent
collection is The Body in Space
(Shearsman 2014). Earlier work includes two book-length sequences, Window for a Small Blue Child and The Powerlines. Her poetry can be found
at www.gerriefellows.co.uk. She
lives and works in Glasgow.