undulations

Thick Scottish brogue
and unkemp hair, brown eyes,
the sticky sound of hardground wax
stopped-out across the plate into a film,
the burin-scratching stories by the pool of
linseed gold poured into folds of powdered pigments
and the oiled smell across the crunch of copper shavings underfoot,
the slide of pennies with no splash into a nitric bath and
feathers trailing bubbles in the blue, their sideways
bite, white squares of felt rolled into dabbers
pressing ink against sugar-lifted mezzotints
and crisply crumpled tarlatins, each time
like Rembrandt standing-by beside the
iron-rhythmed crank of lifting stiffened
blankets up into the whispered
pull of wet-white Arches,
their proof, a looped
inspection and the
pungent smell of
solvent near the
funnelled pour
of acid, spent
and splashing
back into
a jar.


And while we worked, he told us stories, once recounting
time spent in a boat with fishermen, out along the coast
of his home town, there at night to watch them reel
in the nets and pulling-up their catch to find a
woman's body tangled in the fish, caught in
the luminescent grey and in the rain of it,
serpentine-surreal light reflected off the
skin and onto his recurring canvases,
re-visiting that event with
undulating strokes,
unclad figures
writhing in Damar,
Max Beckman-like,
hot-pinked and lemon-yellowed,
next to sheathed-and-knarly fishermen,
thick fingers clutching labyrinthine lines in voyeuristic vigil,
his expressionism brushing past the violet veracity of its release.

And why is it
that wherever
I am in this net,
you are not
too far behind,
leaving traces
and remainders,
tracking links,
like shadows
one can't shake?
Just let me go.