_WHITE.png)
17 Oct 2024
Jon
Stone
Full
Moon
.png){kind=small}
Nov 1st
Oct 2nd
Not Receiving
Visitors
After Sidney Sime’s
The Incubus (1899)
Lately I have lain awake while a lamp throbs and flutters, my face turned upward into a pool of dark – as if that pool had been lowered like a scrim, or a coffin into its pit.
What was I reading? The page in my mind is blank. All I can locate, in the room and in my mind’s eye, is the depths of that body of blackness. My ceiling is its lakebed, my curtain cords its weeds. But this room ought not to have curtains.
I look and look into the pool until I see the shape. Not exactly there, but almost. About to be there, you might say. On his way. Dangling like a pair of thin keys.
He is the other me, coming to cover my mouth with his hand. Reaching for my ear with his thumb and forefinger, to turn it like a tiller. He is pelted. It is a very fine, very blue, very smooth and splendid pelt.
Behind the poem...
I visited the Sime Gallery at Worplesdon a few years ago. Hard to remember exactly when, as I was in the middle of a terrible, damaging relationship. I went with my then-partner to help her find a particular print she was looking for. Though she was very possessive of Sime as a subject, I later suggested we work together on a set of poems based on his images. The poem you see here, which takes Sime’s The Incubus as its inspiration, was drafted as a tester. I hadn’t meant it to, but it conveys – alarmingly – something very particular about that time in my life.
