Ian Crockatt

SELF PORTRAIT

The background is blank, suggesting this artist saw
nothing but himself. Whatever the medium is
it is unstable as steam on glass –
it gives the impression the artist could scarcely draw
breath, has the feel of a failing man's kiss.
But to assume he was picturing his own death is as
fanciful as photographing ghosts.

History calls him the "Lord of Hosts",
and his biography reads like fiction –
a big, tortured character, but somehow never
complete; a hand, a beard, a voice, all diction
and bossiness and given to words like forever...
No other likeness is known, or allowed.
Illusion is given substance by his use of the shroud.

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JOHN THE BAPTIST

My school is the desert.
In the dry slot of a cave
I study what is.

There is the heart,
pumping its river of nutrients
to the famished flesh.

There is the brain's
mesh of synapses, and the tremble-
wired spine, masterminding

the distribution of
uppers and downers, salts and catalysts,
tracking the tidal appetites,

the protean gonadal hungers,
the peristaltic rhythms of the gut.
And there is the mind,

that great white skate
gone deep, miles under
your turrets of coral and cutting keels

and glitter-dust shoals, so deep
it's high on the fear
of what it might meet – mirage-

beasts, alter-egos, doppelgangers,
all those alien realities
tenting the mental skin

between this world and the rest.
And yes, there is the soul,
that hypothesised planet

whose name is a fleshless rumour
passed on in wordless
speech – and all that weightlessness

of space, and the boot-sucking crust
of the earth, all craving their harvest.
And lastly there is God,

As real as you want,
unsure what's coming next except
for an end to this, your world

of Pilates and Herods,
peasants and privileged star-gazers,
divisions of goats from sheep.

I was there when the mother
caressed that swathe of baby-skin
in which he swaddled

his hybrid creation –
his singer without a tongue,
birdsong without the bird,

one soul
with an audible name.
Look, in your mirror's mirage,

where the bevel bisects belief,
rumours are happening.
Naked as human fear,

with a rod for splitting atoms
and a riddle for sifting genes,
the mutant appears.

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ORDERS

Get your men to beat their shields.
The crowd will wheel and clot,
but this is no practised phalanx
following orders; more like
magnetised iron-filings,
or a finch-flock. Check out

that rod of a man
with two suns for his eyes
and hands like turtle doves – he's
the cause; forever
confounding the real
and speaking in riddles. Did he

once roll back the tide,
or conduct an electrical storm? Is that why
women tug at his clothes
and trust our heirs to his arms –
mine included? That kind
of abuse must be stopped.

Instruct your men
to be circumspect with the mob –
sheep can turn into wolves. Remember
they think he can save them
from themselves – that makes him
a dangerous man to cross.

Ideas and extravagant words dis-
order the mind – see, they swirl round him
like water and he walks
all over them like some brash God –
"of Love", my bitch-wife yelps. Inform your men
that I am particularly anxious

to nail this one myself.

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