Four Poems on the Tapestry Art of Jilly Edwards*

Yellow is the New Blue

From the train window
that yellow of summer
****-bright, and almost aromatic,
not a field colour in a fifties childhood
so we grew up without it you and I,
first curious at its occasional occurrence,
then somewhat overwhelmed
by its presence where pasture green
or golden wheat once was, and now this,
more than lemon and lemon-sharp too,
wonderfully colliding with any blue day
when the sky rests against a wolding sweep
of this crop the colour of daffodil.


Follow the Path to the Heart

Altar piece? But no, too small,
and there’s no God hiding there
under the table: this is on the wall.

Anyway, look at the panels here,
blue at the far end, surprising
but necessary, a clear

sea depth folding into itself a bare
surrounding whiteness of peace,
of supplication, a contemplative sampler

free from improving verse
or repetitious decoration.
It is all it is, even less.


Woolly Pictures and Plastic Boxes

I don’t do woolly pictures on the wall,
She said, and her son had smiled
in agreement. Long narrow strips instead,
She continued, rolled up to fit in a box
with tail-like braids sneaking out
and around and across and down
falling from a shelf or a window sill.

And those plastic (partitioned) boxes,
oohh! – I bought fifty wholesale from
Muji,  she exclaimed. I fill them
with moments, with evidence
of my journeying: always a railway ticket,
sometimes a torn wrapper stitched to mend,
then a tiny tapestry woven to fill one frame,
inevitably, a large-lettered cautionary word.

Standing on their sides my boxes
become rows of open windows,
a transparent gathering of memory,
a railway carriage of memorabilia.  
You can take them out, she said,
and put them back in a different way.
Memory is like that, the same trip
but the ordering altered:
there and back, back and there.


Ma

It’s a state of mind
Agnes talks about
and draws without a ruler,
a grid empty of everything
except the line, except a colour
all across and down
on *washi paper.

It’s space, you know,
a gap, a pause, an interval
or a consciousness of place,
a simultaneous awareness
of form and non-form,
an intensification of vision.

There it is on the wall.
This one, she points,
more blues than a lonely blue
ma gives shape to the whole,
my tapestry of negative space.

When I look at the sea
it’s all ma out there,
in the sparkle of reflections
on the cut-glass water,

where there is too much form
to hold against the heart,
where space is substance.

I think of you as a model
and I a painter I am not.
For you, my love,
carry stillness
I only wonder at.

I paint you naked on our bed,
imagine how I’d take this line of thigh,
that curve of breast, those dark shadows
of the lower back, a perfect ear,
a curl of hair, all and more
and because, and only when . . .

And after, then
we sit together
formally, at a concert:
there you are
all dressed in stillness.
Motionless your skirt
falls across a quiet knee
to a booted leg, you so rich
in graciousness and charm
that only the flow of a woman’s
costume holds for the painter’s eye.
Oh, and that warm confidence
born of a body, loved, admired,
always wondered at;
but whose senses so alive
to  syllables’ speech,
to movements’ play.

Therefore with my restless hand
I, for whom stillness is a foreign land,
hold this pen and scratch this page
to write you into each and every phrase,
all and every word and line.

It was just after four and he had been at his desk since early morning. He would stop every so often, turn away from his desk and think of her. They had spoken, as so often, before the day had got properly underway. It seemed necessary to know what each other had planned on their respective lists or calendars. But he had hidden from her an unexpected weariness, a fatigue that had already plagued the day. He felt beaten down by it, and had struggled to keep his concentration and application on the editing that he had decided to tackle today, so he was clear from it for tomorrow.

Tomorrow was to be a different day, a day away, a day of being visible as the composer whose persona he now felt increasingly uncomfortable in maintaining. He would take the train to Birmingham and it would be a short walk to the Conservatoire.  He would stop at the City Art Gallery and view the Penguins – or Dominicans in Feathers by Alfred Stacey Marks , and then upstairs to the small but exquisite collection of ukiyo-e. He would avoid lunch at the Conservatoire offered by a former colleague who he felt had only made the gesture out of politeness. They had never had anything significant to say to one another. He had admired her scholarship and the intensity of her musicianship: she was a fine singer. But she was a person who had shown no interest in his music, only his knowledge and relationship with composers in her research area, composers he had worked with and for. He doubted she would attend the workshop on his music during the afternoon.

He was often full of sadness that he could share so little with the young woman spoken with on the phone that morning, and who he loved beyond any reason he felt in control of. Last night he had gone to sleep, he knew, with her name on his lips, as so often. He would imagine her with him in that particular embrace, an arrangement of limbs that marked the lovingness and intimacy of their friendship, that companionship of affection that, just occasionally and wonderfully, turned itself in a passion that still startled him: that she could be so transformed by his kiss and touch.

He was afraid he might be becoming unwell, his head did not feel entirely right. He was a little cold though his room was warm enough. It had been such a struggle today to deal with being needfully critical, and maintaining accuracy with his decisions and final edits. He had had to stand his ground over the modern interpretation of ornaments knowing that there existed such confusion here, the mordent being the arch-culprit.

He stopped twice for a break, and during these 20-minute periods had turned his attention to gratefully to his latest writing project: The Language of Leaves. He had already written a short introduction, a poem about the way leaves dance to and in the wind of different seasons. At the weekend he had spent time over a book of images of leaves from across the world. He had read the final chapter of Darwin’s book The Powerful Movement of Plants, the final chapter because after publication Darwin suggested to a friend that this chapter was really the only worthwhile part of the book! He had then read an academic paper about the history of botanical thought in regard to the personification of plants, starting with Aristotle and ending with the generation after Darwin.

But his thoughts today were on writing a poem, if he could, and would once his editing task for the day had reached a realistic full stop. After leaves dancing he could only think of their stillness, and that was just a short jump to thoughts of the conservatory. Should he ever gain an extravagance of riches he would acquire a house with a veranda (for the woman he loved), outbuildings (for her studios – he reckoned she’d need more than one before long) and a conservatory (for them both to enjoy as the sun set in the North Norfolk skies below which he imagined his imagined house would be). And suddenly, at half past four, after his thinking time with this lovely young woman who occupied far more than his dreams ever could, he turned to his note book and wrote:  while leaves may dance . . .  And he was away, as so often the first line begetting a train of thought, of association, a fluency of one word following another word, and often effortlessly. A whole verse appeared, which he then took apart and rearranged, but the essence was there.

And so he thought of a conservatory, a place of a very particular stillness where the leaves of plants and ornamental trees were just as still as can be. Where only the leaves of mimosa pudica would move if touched, or the temperature or light changed. It was a magical plant whose leaves would fold in such extraordinary ways, and so find sleep. His imagined conservatory was Victorian, and in the time-slip that poetry affords it was time for tea and Lucy the maid would open the door and carry her tray to the table beside the chair in which his beautiful wife sat, who ahead of the fashion of the time wore her artist’s smock like a child’s pinafore, an indigo-dyed linen smock with deep pockets. She had joined him after a day in her studio (and he in his study), to drink the Jasmine tea her brother had brought back from his expedition to Nepal. She would then retire to her bedroom to write the numerous letters that each day required of her. And later, she would dress for dinner in her simple, but lovely way her husband so admired.

While leaves may dance
as the wind visits, passing by
on its way from there to here,
there can be a stillness too
that comes upon itself, falls,
descends even, alighting on
plant or tree and settles, stays
for a moment or maybe a while,
restlessness resting.

In the conservatory
it is time for tea
and the finches flit about
as Lucy opens the door,
brings the tray forward
to the table by the Citrus Sinensis.
A plain girl whose face lights up
as the little birds flutter to her side,
and suddenly bright-eyed,
with grace she kneels
to wait the required moments
for the Lapsang to enfuse
before pouring, before filling
my bone china cup painted
with the quaking aspen leaves
of the Populous Tremuloides
shimmering and fluttering,
quivering like butterflies.

When all is said and done
with the day we lie
as one form splayed on our bed:
poetry’s slaves here shackled
fast to the word.
Now beaten, now caressed,
perplexed and often
moved by rhythm’s rhyme
to tears and more -
if there’s a sweeter gift this side
of love’s kiss it waits upon another page,
which we may turn one night,
and finding fall into pleasure’s pain.

it was as if every day
might be the last
he would wake in the night
with help me on his lips
but too late he thought
too late

I am beyond help
because I have selfishly ignored
both reason and right
and now I must take this life
apart

he was surprised at the calm
this realisation engendered
he would carry on from day to day
attempting small acts of kindness
being patient with his wife
his children his few friends

to the woman he loved
out of all mind he had only
admiration felt only tenderness
and hoped she would know this
to be true despite what he knew
he had to do