photo by Giya Makondo-Wills
Jackie Wills lives in Brighton and is Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Sussex University 2011-12. She is working on a fifth collection of poems and collaborating with artist Jane Fordham on a series of unique books. She writes for business, tutors for the Open University and works as a writing mentor. She has undertaken residencies in many different contexts. She was Aldeburgh Poetry Festival’s poet in residence in 2004 and in 2007 worked alongside musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra to create text and music with young people based on John Adams ‘On the Transmigration of Souls’. John Adams attended the performance at the Barbican. She has run weekly workshops for unaccompanied asylum seekers living in a hostel in Chichester and spent a year at Unilever’s management offices in Kingston working on use of language. She has worked with many visual artists including Helen Storey, and in galleries including The Baltic, De La Warr Pavilion and Fabrica in Brighton where she and Jane Fordham co-devised an events programme for Anish Kapoor’s Blood Relations in 2009. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent is Commandments (Arc, 2007). She has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and was one of Mslexia magazine’s New Women Poets of the Decade 2004.
Her language
She needs to find other large mammals, horses maybe, or goats. Elephants don’t trust her, understandably. Too old for children, she’s left holding language between her teeth. Its sound will only travel when she talks to trees, addresses herself in a skim of water. Her jokes escape. On behalf of, on behalf of… As the only woman, she begins… Once she could see everything, sitting with friends.
Canopy
When boots left the path in that forest, the canopy hushed. Each tree held back light, mote by mote. Ants stripped the bones. She looks at how the city creeps up mountainsides towards distant, painted shrines. Thorns whiffle with ribbon, a newborn’s sock, a doll’s lace bra.
August 3, Feast of St Lydia
(seller of purple)
for Jane
Lydia sold purple to spiny snails to oysters whelks madder roots lichen to the buddleia lavender violet iris to the atelopus frog to the honeycreeper jay martin finch to the purple fire fish to Cape Town police for a water cannon to the pool table and Forbidden City to the purple emperor to Nero senators cardinals to Justinian for the Basilica of San Vitale to Carthage Constantinople to Zembra Inishkea to the weavers of robes stolen by Alexander in Susa to William Henry Perkin Victoria in mourning to monks bent over the Book of Kells to Pliny for his Natural History to merchants on the Silk Road to Alice Walker Hendrix on guitar to Shakespeare as he conjured Cleopatra’s sails to the icon painter of the Annunciation
The Chalk Sea
Praise chalk for its clear paths easy drainage, blank mind.
Cement works In this cradle of flyovers cloisters are lit by the moon and dust invents an office of stickmen to move water up impossible gradients, imagine an even bigger dome. Sheep on the floodplain are oblivious to its silence, as pipes are to steam, barbed wire to skin, and shafts to the powder that narrows them. Woman, man He sprawls on turf, watching the screen above. He lives for the apex in a V of geese. She’s planning to turn herself into a landmark the big-breasted, white-haired, missing eighth sister. Flint This sky, to the west, is a sump. It sags with grey, leaks a brownish stain. And the shore is squatted by crows. A girl paces the causeway-camp on paths lumpy with flint – hoaxes in the shapes of a goat’s hoof, boy’s foot. She digs past them to gouge her sister a place in the chalk below, lays a newborn and sea urchin beside her.
It can’t be remade
Wood spits all it knows of seeds ballooning into mistletoe, rips skeletons out of its own leaves. A dog howled all night - now it chases morning. The sky cringes, the clouds don’t move, as if inexhaustible blue is too much for us right now. He will plunge me into an undertow of weed. Am I a sail or white flag?
The seals’ goodbye
His kisses, soft as anemones, dab liner from my cheeks. The train rolls out, imperceptibly. It’s too soon to stop, wrong, a backward look, when I’m still chanting Sanctus to the rocks. Evolution with all its blunders made the eye and everything it sees: a salty bed, the seals’ goodbye.
A flame
A shout, the bus stop queue turns in formation and a man sprints past carrying two carrots. The grocer’s in the opposite direction, past Wizard of Ink and Fellas so he can’t have nicked them. He heads into two lanes of traffic breathing loud. Even though there’s frost his arms are bare in a purple t-shirt and he holds two fat carrots high in his fist like an Olympic flame, Zeus close behind with a chain to shackle the bastard to a rock so his liver can be ripped out day after day. Maybe waking up with a need to run was a premonition – charging at the 25 bus and its 8.30 cargo, his way of blowing life into dusty charcoal.
Utterance
Michael, that morning the Devon air recast the dawn. We’d been turned away from the hospital. Instead of flattening clouds, layering blue with pink and grey as a sunrise should, a column rose beyond the fields, ahead of the sun. You, always jumping from planes, must have felt the same cold, seen the phenomenon before – like dad whose motto, the air is unforgiving of mistakes, stood on the mantelpiece. Remember? I thought of you in Cassis, when a rainbow stood upright over the sea this summer gone – signalling a storm. There’s always an explanation. But none for why we couldn’t utter a word to one another all those years.
Sheepcote Valley
Today the first elder is out, creamy, narcotic. The dog’s disturbed a skylark and this will go on all summer. I watch the bird hurl itself up, away from an invisible nest. It beats a vertical song a thousand feet high and disappears into two hundred and thirty notes a second, amplifies earth and sun. The lark claims me, the dog walker with his pack, the boy with no job, trying Asda again. It shakes out the sky and smoothes the sea to catch whoever falls.
Wandering womb
She’s in the summerhouse of Kipling’s garden when her womb feels waves thud on the prom wall. It shivers at each explosion. A runner leans uphill, away from the sea. Her womb is moving between her hand, neck, breasts, knees. When it reaches her head it wants to rearrange benches, make a wasp’s nest, set up by the road with an old treddle machine, stain itself to match early purple crocuses. It lifts up the sea bed, peels waves from the shingle and carries them inland so she can post them to friends.
La Fontasse
There are so many bends in the stone track through the maquis, we walk past myrtle, sage and juniper and there’s no evidence of the place. We don’t know what to expect until it’s in front of us - a low yellow house, hiding in a sweltering afternoon. There’s a man on a porch playing chess with the view and Jean Pierre, who shows us the tap. Tomorrow we’ll swim out to boats anchored in the calanque, watch boys fall from a fingernail of rock into water so clear nothing need ever be lost.
Watching birds fly through the sinking mist
The mist is closing in on the birds, their morning noise and feeding, absorbing the elms. Slugs and snails have invaded the lawn. The mist comes from the sea. Nothing I do, or you, can disperse it - just as I can’t stand on a stump of sycamore and fly to the neighbour’s roof. I carried the fledgling out of my kitchen and put it on that stump. It flew, its mother flew with it. Then I grabbed a handful of earth, felt how heavy the mist has made it today.
