Hartlepool Cinderella

Hartlepool in winter, in its desolate ballgown of closed pier Victoriana, hunches her shoulders against the wind. Chance it or dance it, under the arches the artist gathers her materials: used condoms, a sea-bitten toothbrush, bottle-tops, rusted through. Hands to work and hearts to God, she mutters to herself, turning over ideas, hopes and feelings. The next show would be like the promise of the wind at her back filling her sails with the beauty of change. It was themed for Shelley: Changed Futures, Chanced Futures and Naught May Endure but Mutability.
She passed the first of the painted doors without a second glance. Her mind was busy, collating, curating, a taxonomy of objets trouves: a cork, slotted with a verdigrised 20p, the names of the celebrants almost legible. She turned it in her hand. That was the nature of her work, her life. Possessions and purposes, always sliding in a state of making and unmaking. A scattering of gravel, a lighthouse of coloured sand, the broken body of a doll, one arm missing, tears on its face inked in blue pen. If looks could change, she murmured, stroking its torn and matted hair. I'd give you peace of mind. Instead I'll give you a piece of my mind. You shall have your place in my show.
Hartlepool, sand and gravel, like a small poem by Betjeman, shuddering under its snakeskin sky, waiting for the storm to break.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Nativity

Float me into the world heaving tumultuously, I am turning through the cosmic flux, God's brief ejaculation smeared across the void. The angels fumble for humility, cover their faces with their wings, put all heaven in a stir. And here I am, born to you. Colours flare and settle, the black shine on a rook's eye, the highbrow gilding on Simone Martini's annunciation, the blue of the hedgerow sloe. The world absorbs me as if my osmosis. Exult ye company of Heaven, here I am. Born again. Perhaps you will think it selfish, or self-indulgent at the very least, all this noise about my coming. Perhaps you would prefer the silent language of the unheard, unlistened-for, felt arrival. Me, bursting through the transparent veil between this world and the last. But hush me as you will, the Gods are glad and clap their hands for joy, for their creation, and the world's absolute refusal to be quiet.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Norwegian Eulogy

The Norwegian slide easel stands in triplicate before the mirror's triptych riddle. Two explorers from the turn of the century look out of the frame: why did the deer leap so high and so fast? The light has faded to a friendly vintage sepia. They stand on shale or scale, the mountain's dust, arms about each other's shoulders. They have climbed, hand after hand after hand, an unbreakable link, taken a turn around themselves, to send this small miraculous image and send it fluttering down the generations to land here on your birthday dressing table, beside the roses and the pumpkin-shaped box of dark chocolates.
Why is time fallow? Now it pools, as dark as the rust on a starling's breast, now it is a leap across the road, now it is read in the wind's spirited script blowing near illegible across the field. This is how to make sense of the world. The tiny silvered print shivers and is still. Macro and microcosm. We're in there somewhere. Here is the light catcher winking a semaphore of shame and redemption, of loss and restoration. Don't ask how something can be so beautiful in such a sad place. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
Maybe his wife will suffer a push through the earth, or a slip through the feathered air, or a rising funnel of bubbles from the pond and rejoin him, here, in this moment, now. While all the other possibilities are still looking elsewhere. Maybe they will find their reunion in the multiple refractions of the mirror's threefold version of their lives and the slide will momentarily be them, on their wedding day, beneath a storm of rice, held precariously in honour on the  humble Norwegian slide easel.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Let Them Eat Cake

Someone to watch over me, begs Rapunzel from the moon tower. Tonight the moon is in its perigee. It is done with losing face. Inspiration has come to her through the tiny window, before which she kneels, hands folded on knees, begging. Someone to watch over me...
Rapunzel closes her eyes and imagines her celestial protector: massive, festooned in violet lights, like stars, like the lit inklings of midwinter. She imagines the sea-clean smell of him. She imagines the transformation of her shabbily lit life as he drifts in, brimming with greatness. In her mind's eye fish leap from the waters at his feet, birds chevron the sky in his wake, even drear humanity drags itself across the fields bringing him tiny handmade cakes of ginger and marzipan.
In his presence it will be possible to have your cake and eat and be fulfilled, to partake of the glowing crumb and be forever satisfied. For him she would gladly slip into the straitjackets of the old witches: Mercy and Honour. They would be soft and silky, like a sleeping child's flushed cheek. Feathers fly through the air. the bearded angels have been here.
Rapunzel stays on her knees, hoping for a future once read in the palm of her mother's hand, to be fully present. Praying for someone to watch over her.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

A Woman's Right to Shoes

The King and Queen are squabbling about their dancing shoes. She is all for high art, a statement pair, something from a fantasy. The King, knowing exactly where that will lead, would prefer she went barefoot, or in something fashioned out of mud.  It is the evening of the Great Feast. Their hot words are fuelled by the anticipation of sucking on songbirds drowned in cognac, oysters rolling in straight from the sea, the tenderness of well bruised beast.
 In the kitchen Cook is pricking the skins of pigs to crackle and amuse the guests. Dry rot will provide the delicacy of funghi braised in Vintage Chablis. Just a penny here, and a penny there thinks Cook as he slices the pale stalks of the mushrooms, licks the blood off his knife, seeks snails in his earthy box.
Looking into the mirror's triptych the Queen adjusts the precise calibration of her frown. She'll take a chance she thinks, and wear the glass slippers after all. She extends a foot for the King's approval. The King flushes with a quaint retro anger, his face a pink potty hurled into a corner, and sulks towards his own wardrobe. The Queen, unable to decide whether she has won or lost, forces her feet into splintering glass and rises tottering to cross the room. Pink bubbles froth in her footsteps. The King turns his back. Nut Case, he bellows, and in the pantry the cook shivers.
The problem is, continues King, swallowing his mood as if it were  straight whisky, we have drifted apart. I could chase you in your glass slippers down the cindered path; the cook could serve us something or other - let's say for the sake of argument, wolf, as soft in death as Romeo. It wouldn't make it right.It wouldn't bring you back.
What do you want? The Queen asks, tenderly, stroking his thin hair.
Wear these instead, he begs, and hands her a pair of hare-pelt stilettos. Here, let me wipe the blood.
And in the end, it seemed such a small thing to please him. So she did.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Desiring Alice

How long has he been gone? it is impossible for him to gauge. After all that has happened he knows that it is not the future but the past that is incredible. He puzzles over its shattered remains. He'd had just one throw of the lucky dice, who knew it would land this way?
Breath rises and falls. Gravity continues to work. His heart does not forget to beat. This stupid body, doesn't it even know how not to carry on? He longs for the chance to demolish goodbye. He longs for everything to have been different, to have killed her in a rage, to have written her story in code in a diary dull of secrets, to have washed her feet in oil and tears and dried them with his rough tongue. Always a sea-man, his inclination is to salt everything: danger, love, dinner.
Alice, the name rolls in his mouth like a pebble, like the flawed orb of a moonstone. Alice, at the lifting edge of evening, opening her mouth and smiling at him, waving, as though she is the heroine of love's silent film. Then turning and burning all his boats. The celluloid curls as she sets the light to each one.
Still, he wants her. In spite of everything he wants the season of forgiveness. He wants the pure peacefulness of her standing by the bay window, looking out, pouring tea into cracked cups, distilling their lives together into something almost fine and old.
Not this, not this chill longing, this glacial angel at his spine, this long laddered lifetime of desiring Alice.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele

Pantoum: The Heart's Repeating Gestures

I sing to you at last of golden archways
Light falling in lozenges on quiet squares
I sing to you of mystery, shadow-light and shade
While everyone looks the other way.

Light falling in lozenges on quiet squares
Mercy and love answer me
While everyone looks the other way
Like blood leaking from wine.

Mercy and love answer me
Let your voice rise with mine
Like blood leaking from wine
Its all the same to me.

Let your voice rise with mineIn languages that sit softly in the mouth
It's all the same to me
All that is unsaid, but will be said somehow.

In languages that sit softly in the mouth
The thuribler and the boy
All that is unsaid, but will be said somehow.
The heart's repeating gestures

The thuribler and the boy
The body electric and a soul of dust
The heart's repeating gestures
Of oneness and of many, and of trust.

The body electric and a soul of dust.
The hem of darkness lifts and light steps in
Of oneness and of many and of trust,
soft soft she treads, soft soft she must.

The hem of darkness lifts and light steps in
I sing to you of mystery, shadow-light and shade
Soft soft she treads, soft soft she must
I sing to you at last of golden archways.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele