Judy Brown
Ground
The ground rises as the years go,
as the skin thickens on a man’s jaw.
The world swells with the rubbings
from all those hides, and time’s slow bruise.
The joined skull-plates of our floors
lie over the casings of older creatures,
the laid setts that history’s people
scuffed at in their harsh shoes.
Under the powdered skins of the portrait
is the underpainting. In terre verte
or in thinned ochre, the artist first locks in
the butts of bone, the eggs of the big muscles.
The nymphs were once this naked
then the dark glass of the linseed
sank their bright pigments in syrup,
pulling them under and into the distance.
It’s like diving when I go down
in memory to the barracks in Kowloon,
where, in early evening, we lay gasping
between walls like marbled endpapers,
already wrapped in old brown light,
and the lit fish tank hung a dark cloth
of the sea over our hot clamberings,
printing our skins with the past.
as the skin thickens on a man’s jaw.
The world swells with the rubbings
from all those hides, and time’s slow bruise.
The joined skull-plates of our floors
lie over the casings of older creatures,
the laid setts that history’s people
scuffed at in their harsh shoes.
Under the powdered skins of the portrait
is the underpainting. In terre verte
or in thinned ochre, the artist first locks in
the butts of bone, the eggs of the big muscles.
The nymphs were once this naked
then the dark glass of the linseed
sank their bright pigments in syrup,
pulling them under and into the distance.
It’s like diving when I go down
in memory to the barracks in Kowloon,
where, in early evening, we lay gasping
between walls like marbled endpapers,
already wrapped in old brown light,
and the lit fish tank hung a dark cloth
of the sea over our hot clamberings,
printing our skins with the past.
Page(s) 75
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