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, as a row of caskets,
a street from an Umbrian paradise,
in
which lies the fashion I deplore.
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.
What seems close to your eye is gloomy as Calvary.
Since
I painted that your eyes have changed.
Javelin spars from the boats on the beach jab into town.
What is the
man with his hat pulled down
doing, holding a bottle
on
the upturned keel?
My wife is dying of consumption.
The dog looks
at something no longer there,
since I took off a width of the canvas,
and
somebody stands in the middle,
half black and half white, and looks away from the shore
that a running
figure hauls a line to, followed by breakers
and the shapes, whose homebound speed draws their sides
into
curves, of three brown sails.
I have finished my picture; it is highly finished.
John Gibbens
