Up-And-Doing by Christopher Barnes

(after This Unimportant Morning by Lawrence Durrell)

Leaving you
I open the door to a shift-work of bark beetles.
Sun’s cramped,
The crater’s knick-knack blue as it airs.

A cockleboat ruffles the orangey pool,
A sample mail van’s put-up.

In two hours I’ll relocate
A columbine thaw will suffuse
Over siltstone, sea wall
Reviving in pepper breath.

You pout away sleep
Deep space slackens its twirls,
An airborne miller moth
Will have its pupa.


Christopher Barnes, UK

Simplifying Animals And Objects by Christopher Barnes

The line. Painting, absterging. Meticulousness
Pinched, boundaries of opal blues, fire-lit
Boleros. Radiance of a bull’s curve spiked,
Pricking dealers who thought he was mad. Drawings
Sold, ten rusty sous in a Paris-shade junkshop:
Marks on white paper, depictions of common people,
Cubed segments planed in earthly chizzled-out strokes.
There is meaning in colour. A garnet-red mattress
Can be delicious.

Through haze of xanthic squalls memory of man
To man, love in the pleasing rub of afternoons,
Harlequins, saltimbanques parading rough-toothed
Canvas, sensuous as drawing, a line.
Devil-may-get-you twist spins his Surrealist verse,
Unpunctuation learned from plays acted out
By lamplight. Smell of oil, Max Jacob,
Moon crumbling on books. War, undoing,
Necks twisted, broken lines, dinner with Matisse,
Smudging Thursday evenings. A request
“Pablo pass the wine”.


Christopher Barnes, UK