TP logo

Home | Books | Music | Events | New work | Contact & ordering

 

The Chain Pier, Brighton


A quiff, a dry-bone rise of cliff
arches down the mounting brightness
with pink and grey, smart houses led along
to a distant white:

I lit it, clear and cubic, a row of caskets,
like the street of an Umbrian paradise.
There lies the fashion I despise.
The pier is a sequence of bleak engineering smiles

pulling out, pulling England out to sea,
and the cut of a light sail comes in against it.
Waves are falling
into the umbrage of the foreground

where three anchors topple along the shaded sand.
My wife’s dying of consumption.
What seems close to your eye is gloomy as Calvary.
The javelin spars of the boats on the shore jab into town.

Your eyes have changed from when I painted that.
What is the man with his hat pulled down
doing on the overturned keel
holding a bottle?

And the dog looks at something that’s there
no longer, since I took off a width of the canvas.
In the middle is somebody standing,
half black and half white,
who looks away from land,

which the running figure hauls a line into, followed by breakers
and shapes whose homebound speed
draws their sides into curves, of three brown sails.
I have finished my picture. It is highly finished.



John Gibbens



Back to the present