All the anthropologists will be talking about

this gorilla in a cage

and this gorilla in a cage won’t get a chance

to say anything.

3. Loft

Something gripped and bit at the canvas.

Did I really believe it? (Not: Did I like it?)

This paint didn’t really feel like paint.

It spoke to me. I spoke to it.

Was it true or not, under the dirty skylights?

Taking no chances, I painted the whole loft:

easels, broken chairs, electrical wire

hanging down, all the way down

to my hand, below, painting it.

I had a hard time sleeping that night.

It briefed me on looking, reported its world:

that chair, this torn cloth, oh yeah, my broken mirror

in dirty greys, fleshy pinks, ochres.

That painting was as good as a Matisse.

When I woke up, I destroyed it.

Poussin’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’

for Ruth Padel

Lying there. Just knotted and crushed

by speckled coils. A whistling snap and bite.

I could have sworn I saw him smile.

But wrong, that. That was only his last try,

a grabbed breath short

of shining back to a table’s warmth,

the glow of fruit, his girl’s toasted cheeks.

He’s lying there and all the fishwife can do

is shrug her shoulders, throw up her hands:

This happens all the time, you know.

Got to go, they’re bringing the catch in.

Watch out for the nets, the thickets, the pits.

Don’t stumble around in the dark.

Don’t ask for it.

Aperture

i. m. Diane Arbus (1923–1971)

What would the knife-grinder want

with a broken spoon and a pair of melons,

a Japanese bowl spangled with an iron glaze

and three dried lilies?

He’s waiting for the little boy and girl

standing hand in hand

to cross the chalk line between kerb and street

and go off like rockets

while the barber stares, mouth open,

through his clean glass door, razor in hand,

a customer strapped in his chair.

The ibis-headed god in the Art Deco panel

above the knife-grinder’s door is candid:

‘When it’s time,’ he says, double-checking

the man’s heartbeat, ‘you gotta use the snake.’

Passepartout

Press quickly through doorways.

There’s no telling what you might see

if you stop in your tracks to fix a frame

around a capuchin chopping a watermelon

on a plank laid across a trench.

His cleaver slices ribbons of air, flicks slivers

of wounded fruit into space with each stroke,

leaving the green skin stippled, naked, empty

on bleached wood.

Or you might happen on the pharaoh of no-moon nights

– ice-cold plums await the brush of his fingers,

neon oranges light up and dangle just out of his reach

and he could kill for them.

In the forest of saw-tooth shadows,

every deer knows his voice and tread.

You watch as he slides down stairways of water, yodelling,