Issue 3: John Welch
‘Even clean hands damage surfaces.’
The soar of the human figure
The uncompromising thrust it makes
the fight it carries on with the force of gravity
[David Smith, quoted at his show at Tate Modern 2006-07]
Thin flat forest lumpy bird
Art shared out among the millions
They arrive with their awkward bodies
Bodies that strive to be different
Clay’s mystic mess, the garden of forms
‘This work and I whole nights together’
And now a sculpture, where it stands,
Among its seeming-still of shadows
There was water stretching in front, narrative glitter
Something came, breaking the surface –
And after so much silence
It arrived like a small mountain
Starting in on it
We could see the game it was playing
‘I’m making a name for myself up here.’
As the day gives out light shrinks to where we are
A plain prose surface, a comfortable-seeming
‘As if it were a city I’d befriended’
Imagine walking through it,texting the dead
But arriving at the event there was nobody there
Just these enormous empty photographs
And a world as if it knew itself without us
Its careful scatterings of leaves
Still, we survived the event
Here in the city we made, sculpture our fetishised sadness
Tate Modern 2006-07
at home
Low trees bus drivers beware
Poor cornered animal
The face shines clear
Always read the label grief
The way the other might
Return you to yourself
Anyway why do you need all those tunes?
A bird’s quizzical stare
And your life, a sort of
Half-hearted quest
Waking from time to time, to a
Happiness you hardly dare to touch?
And finds a
Kind of ground, to practise here being grateful
Out walking early was the best of it
Walking through London
As if the city
Breathed itself towards you
As if language a membrane were flexible
& the night leaning in
Like an intake of breath
Past the leaves that shelter my window –
Leaves of a strong-growing vine
With its useless ‘nephews’
Sirens are safely outside
A fox is calling
Too many words
Abrade the silence
Upbraid the silence?
Imagine the special part
And I only wanted to listen
To what the others see
As if we were travelling
All with one common purpose
Your gentle storm of breath in my ear
And the wind trying hard all night
Maybe I’m in the words like a thumbprint
At home in my strangeness
John Welch lives in Hackney in London. His Collected Poems were published by Shearsman in 2008.
Copyright © 2009 by John Welch, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
