Half Past Three (The Poet)
With my head on aboutways, half past three behind the curtain, flower motifs clock the day. I am subject to a new rhythm. Bella’s cat dictates the play. In this disintegrating reality, slices cut by caffeine open doors.
Find my cat, she’d yelled, and in her straining chords I understood this flickering cat must survive the war. I perhaps am optional. The solace of her lonely marriage, he predates me, hates me, slinks around the cafe to disappear behind upturned tables and huddled suitcases left behind in panic. Through a thicket of chair legs he weaves in and out of the planes of reality, his tail curving a question mark, discomposing my composition the further I depart from insanity. He’s mesmerised my poem too, leading it between the interpenetrating veils of red, blue, green. Cat and poem, both for Bella, must be rescued from the senseless void.
Has Bella reached the border, while I stay to fight with my pen that leaks Cyrillic to no effect, that chops me into angled shapes that fit together only if I ignore the difference between figure and ground. There is no difference. Both melt unequivocally when the bomb destroys the the roof. It hasn’t happened yet. Bella’s cat will bring it, making me wait and burn. You can’t replace him, you’ve come too late, she’d said, when in the cafe she drew the blossoming curtains against the hurtling night. I need a friend not a lover.
In seducing Bella I betrayed her trust. She cannot be betrayed again, not for art, nor love, nor war, all of which are disarranging the city. The floors of apartment blocks have always been made of cardboard. I am no less cardboard; coffee has flattened my humanity. Bella’s too? No. She is flesh to be torn by shrapnel, while in the sloping cafe I leap for the cat as he jumps onto the bar. I miss again; he vanishes to a place only he can reach, the place where all times exist at once. Soon a bomb will incinerate this red table, that fork, these fruiting curtains and the moon’s fading hope of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
More coffee. Is it looting if everything’s been abandoned? Bella’s café, help yourself. I helped myself to Bella, seducing her when there were few games to disrupt the configuration of her family. Never any need for me to snap the brittle axes of normality, like sugar panes, amber, translucent, the world through them awash in sepia. Only me and the cat, now, left to mend the world. We are all doing the molecule’s bidding, surrendered to our separateness. My life is already past. Bella’s too. History is being redrawn around us, the frames loosened from land. Golden looping ropes now, lassos whirling free of treaties, claiming air space and the souls of those who’ve gone. There is no tomorrow. Today – that cat is the integrating cog, the only piece that will retune the lost world of me and Bella, discovering innocence together at half past three behind the curtain, open to the curve.
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Written in response to Marc Chagall’s 1911 painting ‘Half Past Three (The Poet)’