Look, dearest Andrew!
(with your beloved ghost eyes).
Look here!
The cow skull hangs on the wall,
nude as a new babe although
not soft, not warm, not chubby.
No, it looks like an elongated face
with tiny eyes and a huge open scream.
Turn it over and it still screams,
but the extra bones on the underside
are ornate, like frilly trimmings.
These eyes are high and slanted
over pinpoint nostrils,
and the scream this side
is angry.
The lateral view
has a long, thin nose
like a pointing finger
and teeth that hang
like the fringe on a curtain.
Here, the eyes
are cavernous.
Their sightless gaze might dark-swallow
one who looks back.
But this is the bare skull.
Her paintings are phantasmagorical
in the vast book I bought
– do you remember? –
in May 1999, in SanFran on Pier 39,
where you’d dreamed of taking me
our only afternoon there,
on a holiday weekend
so we couldn’t post it home
to Australia.
Between flights out, luggage already
checked in and weighed,
I slung it in a brand new cabin bag
over my shoulder
to re-board,
trying to to look as if it wasn’t
weighing me down.
Like smuggling something unauthorised
onto a space shuttle.
The book. Actual size a little larger than my laptop,
14-and-a-half by 11 inches or 36-and-a-half by 28 cm..
View the museum exhibit here.
Written for NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Two.
Also shared (off-prompt) with Friday Writings #171 at Poets and Storytellers United.
