Issue 16: May 2010

Judy Brown| Jane Draycott | Wayne Holloway-Smith | Amy Key | John Stammers | Heather Philipson

 

HEATHER PHILIPSON

German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London

Page seven – I’ve had enough of Being and Time
and of clothing. Many streakers seek quieter locations
and Marlborough Road’s unreasonably quiet tonight.
If it were winter I’d be intellectual, but it’s Tuesday
and I’d rather be outside, naked, than learned –
rather lap the tarmac escarpment of Archway Roundabout
wearing only a rucksack. It might come in useful.
I can’t take any more of Heidegger’s Dasein-diction,
I say as I jettison my slippers.

When I speak of my ambition
it is not to be a Doctor of Letters
or to marry Friedrich Nietzsche, it turns out,
or to think better.
It is to give up this fashion for dressing.
It is to drop my robe on the communal stairs
and open the front door onto the commuter hour,
my neighbour, his Labrador, and say nothing
of what I know or do not know, except what my body announces.

Ablutions

The bathtub makes me weak –
my heartbeat under water.
Salts, oils, sodium laureth sulphate,
I am a mountain in a lake.
From the corridor, The Romantic Sounds of Xavier Cugat.
I synchronise my loofah.
My big toe turns the hot tap.
Oh God, the changing temperature of bathwater!
Hot and cold I understand;
tepid means less than ever. How hard it is to get things right.
How devastating you looked today across Soho Square
in your pink cashmere sweater,
your man bag over your left shoulder.
and I give myself up trying to say it.
Who was it that first thought of washing?
Your eyes are blue, I have loved you
since I noted your lashes in profile.
I didn’t do it deliberately –
I was distracted
the way foam is distracted from water
and clings all over my contours.

Some Kind of Memento Mori

Oh yes, the woolly mammoths are all gone.
For twenty three and a half hours a day I forget
and then a 40-watt bulb blows as I turn it on.
It’s something unspoken, the burnt-out bayonet –
its filament no longer incandescent,
the electric current without an outlet, and I see –
not much has changed since the Pleistocene.
Removal of the bulb is a change of epoch.

These days there are elephants in Africa, elephants
in India, the new gloom of silhouettes and table lamps,
new pearl bayonets in my cupboard in their boxes.
But the woolly mammoths are gone even in Siberia.
The glass bulb is spent, though shapely in its socket.
I’ve changed plenty of bulbs but this one’s gone
and brought to light the shadows that go on in shadows
or, as I think of it, yes, woolly mammoths.

Why I’d Rather Walk, despite Holes in the Heels of My Trainers

Through windows, the road is a long misunderstanding
confirmed by an engine. It is panoramic condensation.

On foot, it’s a kerb, some raindrops,
two and half miles and so on until the art gallery,

Turkmenistan, the Russia-China border
where Przewalski’s horses gallop for Ulan Bator. Goodbye,

soles of my shoes, the puddles are on their way in.
Mongolian mares must be very glad to be unshod, all-terrain.

A few more metres and my feet will be surprised bathers
in cotton-rich outfits at high tide in the Barents sea.

Help us, the cushioned insoles whine. Walk on! I order.
Fillies outdistance cobblers, bus stops, wetness.

It isn’t possible to recall the first time I heard footfall
but it was as natural as small wild horses.

Le Parc

Every fifth Tuesday of the month my grandfather
would meet with Monsieur Duchamp in le jardin
public. Et voila! Marcel digressed by the weeping
beech tree. The hanging branches touched the
ground. Being an artist, he said in squeezed
English as he probed the foliage, is like crawling
on your hands and knees along a narrow tunnel
just to wash your filthy hands in the sink at the end
of it, and then spending the rest of your life trying
to get out backwards. A nut in a husk hit the soil.
At any time though, my grandfather observed, one
might be hauled out by one’s ankles.