Julia Copus

Since you remain reluctant, let us imagine that one’s selfhood is a work of art — a maquette in clay, as may be, and each life event enacted by the sculptor. In he creeps to the damp-room on his crepe-soled shoes again and again. In time the work proceeds via a series of flukes and inspirations: the sculptor warms to his task; the clay responds with little sucking sounds until it is wrapped and laid for next time on its wooden shelf. Nothing is done in that place that is not reparable. Beyond the clayey dark your helpmeet is waiting. And though his feet in the stiff grass ache with cold he keeps, while he can, his faith; his night lamp lifted.

for Antony and David Impossible to picture a time without it there beneath the living room window, afloat in the shadows of our father’s desk. Its flattened tassels were the rays of sun in a child’s drawing; it was where we must gather, three breathless children, our coats on for school, or to show who was first to be ready for bed, and if we’d a score to settle this was where we must do it. When was the last time we stood there, myself and my two, fly brothers, in the days before their bodies hardened and wives and children hovered round them? It is late, perhaps – a splash of moon at the window. Outside, a row of curtained houses looks blindly away from two small boys and their sister, who have not even thought to arrange the order of their going.