Publications
poetry
Artist: Unknown
the two sisters
I can imagine the soft knobs of their accents;
garlicky lemon sauce.
The watercolour is of an empty afternoon,
pastel-soft with the sisters’ slowly fading existence.
Theirs is the leisure of constantly re-lived moments.
The parlour is luminescent with subdued sophistication.
Tranquillity emanates from the heart of the homestead.
The artist has dumped daylight on the Persian carpet.
Day after day they repeat the same yellow-hued conversation.
Their expressions are enigmatic, unreflecting.
The sister with the moth-eaten hand is embroidering.
She is kept on the brink of completing the tapestry.
They pose suspended over my dressing table.
Caroline F. Archer
puppet master
A cat is smudging its shadow
against the picketing,
gliding with the slant of the sun.
The garden suffocates soundlessly.
Lizards skitter and blink.
The yard teeters on a tightrope.
Late noon, the pigeons scuffle-warble
and settle next to the chimney
to discuss the dry dust on the moon,
the empty seas
of Tranquility and Serenity,
the Bay of Rainbows.
Evenings don’t smell of lavender.
Fragrance and the flight of butterflies
have been captured in a jar.
The house leaks sounds of a stew
simmering on the stove,
a creaking door, shuffling feet,
shoes that scold the floor.
A pipe gurgles in a shifting pitch.
Little more.
One moment, a boy might be
eleven or so, then he wakes in this house,
childhood a distant memory.
Death does not sweep down with a scythe,
does not have a skeleton face.
She sits on the roof, humming listlessly.
Caroline F. Archer
Artist: John William Waterhouse
Magic circles
Listen: a dark caravanserai is crossing the sky.
The night is stifling; you become aware of omens brewing.
A brackish steam is seeping from the countryside:
old remorse penetrates every dream.
A floating coach door has swung open; from up high
a gypsy-woman has dropped down from the sky.
Distant universes are enveloped in the folds of her threads.
The moon and stars are absorbed from above.
She lets loose the evil forces of nature and of hell;
subjects them to her spell.
The raven submits itself; crestfallen.
It shuffles forward; silently, cautiously
as the breath of sleepers.
The circle she traces on the soil
kindles a strait of fire that separates what has gone before
and a doomed future.
A silvery snake coils around her throat.
She is barefoot, sandals still spiralling downward.
The gypsy takes no notice: like the fire the night is cold, unhooked.
She is a sacramental taper that glow-worms green,
a slender angel seen consorting with the forces of nature.
She’s a wild woman and her fires burn cold and implacable.
She controls them at will.
A toad crawls near;
she keeps it at a distance with a dirty shake of her Medusa hair.
Hear her incantation in the sky:
Would that all wild women,
had armour as impenetrable as I.
Caroline F. Archer