after Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini!’ content warning: mental ill health, self-harm suicide   look at the dove   so wide   a suicide against the wall   wrap it up in the blue cloth   I’ve been keeping it unwrinkled for such a purpose   long blue tongue of heaven   little feathers   […]

after Rebecca Horn’s sculpture ‘Concert for Anarchy’ Of all the stupid things I bought with your money worst of them was the piano, a big black grand far too big for our cottage, seeming to tip the floor, upend what little light made it through our windows. I had every intention of learning how to […]

after Millard Sheets’s painting ‘Angel’s Flight’ Only just May and hot as hell at the top of Angel’s Flight behind the glass that keeps you from the sky, your hip jutting out like a threatened cliff, that malted milkshake dress declaring every bump you’ve ever ridden roughshod over, cradling the vacancy inside – too many […]

after John Everett Millais’ painting ‘Return of the Dove to the Ark‘ I.               and the girls have been floating                  in this barn                  for almost a year                  remembering and forgetting     […]

after Louise Bourgeois’s ‘Arched Figure’ Please don’t wake me. Walking on my hands through dream-suburbs of green belt, the gabled house-fronts of Ickenham, I must slumber on through volumes of obsession-diaries, feeding myself with my clever girl’s fingers, tongue grown too big for my mouth. Lying in my stockinette of lard, stitched pig, I feel […]

after Cai Guo-Qiang’s ‘Gunpowder Art’ the rumour unfurled like ink in water that a ten day-war was imminent on the first day we woke to small gifts on our graves rice and apples, toys and books and slices of cake on the second day 100,000 cherry trees were planted on the border that our divisions […]

after Frank Auerbach’s ‘Interior Vincent Terrace’ Let’s start with a piece of furniture – say a table or chair or bed – add some figures have them doing something – making love, quarrelling, misconducting themselves – have me enter with the desire to hang myself like a lantern from your ceiling in the warm wet […]

after Hendrick van Anthonissen’s painting ‘View of Scheveningen Sands’ for Sionna we stood on the shore for a century at least, waiting for something to happen. when paint dries it leaves a ghost of the liquid sea; time exists as space; we watch the enormity of your absence. the past goes extinct. it’s like being […]

after Pietro Longhi The fifth specimen, I believe, since the time of Rome she is an old and nicely padded lady with her skin all ruched and drooping Poverina, ten years paraded before Empress and Elector in the sad company of two dwarves and a crocodile until she ends up here, sans corno to be […]

after Anselm Keifer the dead, who are thinner than gas might fit comfortably in their millions in a simple cardboard box so why this desolate hangar – ankle-deep in guano and plaster-dust, quiet as a sick forest was Buchenwald once really a forest – trees     acid-stripped and skeletal grow down out of a broken pane […]

after Sigmar Polke’s painting ‘The Illusionist’ Her bedroom became her father’s darkroom. Here he made magic, turned negative positive, called her his special assistant. Closely he focused on his assistant, taught her how to work the developer, stop-bath, fixer, too, left her with prints of the family history. Downstairs with arms crossed sat her mother, […]

after Callum Innes’s exposed painting ‘Green Lake’ It is enough to paint a square of black, so black it swallows light, black as a trap-door to the past, black as basalt. Next to it, another black square. Unpaint it with a brush dipped in turpentine, unpaint until the green inside black appears. Focus on black […]

after L.S. Lowry’s painting ‘Seascape’ This scene is teeming with next-to-nothing: sky only just distinguishable from the sea, the sea a hair’s breadth from being beach; I have the feeling that any minute now a single gull will appear, or a pebble will emerge from the only-just sand; that not too long ago, something vanished […]

after Sophie Calle’s ‘Voir La Mer’ to know the sea is to know obliteration— foreground and background coherent in a vista of absolutes. it is the latticed distance between a human body and infinity, forbidden texture of low desire, the sole existent way of approaching the earth from behind. it’s here, stranger. before you. your […]

After Carl Andre’s sculpture “Equivalent VIII” sculpture, made up of 120 fire bricks I will lie down                   like bricks offering you                   the rectangle of my body:                   spare sparse angular                   like the wall you build                   each time I approach