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