Ah that 'fat girl wearing few clothes, her breasts restrained, her arse
rolled up like a silage bale.' the woman of my dreams
P dreaming
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From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Lawrence Upton
Sent: 20 November 2011 13:47
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: St Ives Bay from Barnoon, evening
One looks at an object, an artefact;
and, moving back, expands the notional image
canvas in four directions and upon each conceivable frame;
yet no aspect ratio changes, and no detail's made known:
it is a matter of conception
and of subjective concentration.
The harbour is full, boats fish being tucked,
lifted out of the water with tide fall.
White or lightly coloured, they arrange themselves
at sagging lines - as if something
that had life had let it go mechanical.
The bay itself is empty. The network
of the garden is populated
by non-proprietorial creatures:
no human shows itself. A solo gull
makes a clumsy slow way down the terrace,
apparently trailed by a fat girl
wearing few clothes, her breasts restrained, her arse
rolled up like a silage bale. And houses
at Wheal Dream catch the late evening sun.
[NB Wheal Dream is a small area of St Ives, Cornwall. Wheal means mine and
the mine referred to was a speculation on the belief that tin could be
mined there. Wrong. The geology is, I have learned, against it. The locals
watched the foreigners waste their time and called the project Wheal
Dream.
Tucking - I'm taking a chance here - as I understand it is a process
towards the end of seine fishing for pilchards, a cooperative venture
involving the whole and sometimes multiple communities in which a seine
net is lowered as a barrier to entrap an entire shoal. Tucking nets are
used to actually lift the fish out of the water, draw strings closing with
the weight.
I have heard mackerel fishing with a feather as _mass murder_; so this
would be genocide.
Towards the end of the last century, pilchard shoals stopped coming close
inland!
Thus, _fish_ in this poem is a plural noun.
I thank you]
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UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton
42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover
Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4
wfuk.org.uk/blog
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