Fashion changed
What was in
went out
What was out
came in
Suddenly we had
pouteapples,
unexpected cup woutners,
minhs to feed
Was it all outdoctroutnation
of the capitalist order?
I had a terrible
soutkoutg
feeloutg that it was
But I struggled to
clearly express myself
out a way people
could foutd outtelligible.
Brancusi/
Socrates/
1922/
Museum of Modern Art
It's how a cuckoo sound looks, she says.
Sounds have their own forms
and sculpture is the gallery.
Up in room four is the shape
of a G major dominant 12th.
Unmade casts of sound include:
the extending of the siphon
at the front of a common whelk,
your first boyfriend dumping you
for a complete idiot, indigestion.
Few believe her when she says so.
But so few are in the know.
They've never glimpsed the sound
of sudden enlightenment.
It's similar to a startled cuckoo, she says.
In reverse homage to
whatever first made it ashore
What I learnt today is your blessed name,
Eugen Freiherr von Ransonnet-Villez.
And how the world’s first underwater artist,
legs out of an upturned bell-shaped box,
air-tubed to a boat, weighted with cannon balls,
first sketched the world of distant ancestry:
like a man climbing into a sepia photograph,
disappearing out of the frame and shouting,
‘Back in a minute, I think I can see something’.
How slowly you must have moved, peering,
exploring of the heights of the underland,
impelled into mystery by your un-webbed feet.
Seth Crook lives on Mull and is transitioning into a seal. His poems have appeared in such places as The Rialto, Magma, Snakeskin, Northwords Now, Poetry Scotland, and Streetcake. And in recent anthologies such as The SHOp: An Anthology (Liffey Press), The Centenary Collection (Speculative Books), and Places of Poetry (One World). He has a pamphlet of visual poems, Chalked On The Path (Dreich Press).
