'A Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte', Georges Seurat, 1884

The trombonist will blow unnoticed. Much is absurd:

a monkey, women in bustles, the brass player.

The bourgeoisie reflects in post-prandial

tranquillity… Purges, coronations in Paris,

the metropolis of revolution, where Haussman’s

boulevards were an imperial stockade…

For two sous, the ferry transports Georges Seurat

across the Seine to the Ile de La Grande Jatte. Two years’

preparation, observation of colour, shape,

application of theory delineate an

historical moment, which never occurred.


In shade, a man with a clay pipe reclines, so self-

absorbed he breathes – like the infantry officers

striding this way. The vistas of shadows, sunlight,

water – each coruscating perspective – catch

the city’s portentous murmur… On the Champ de Mars,

Dreyfus is humiliated – in the Place de Grève,

Marie Antoinette… Northward, Prussian howitzers

position. From the Vélodrome d’ Hiver, the Jews

are leaving for Birkenau. Against the high wall

of Pêre Lachaise, the remnant of the Communards

is shot. The citizens are culled in this city

of bloody principle and virtuous

mayhem – thousands in La Semaine Sanglante…

He was of his epoch: diligent, self-

regarding, a scion of the bourgeoisie –

mistress and son secreted in Montmartre.

He conjugated art with science, measured

the golden mean by the chemistry of colour.

He died young of a weakened heart and was buried

in Pêre Lachaise. Light records nothing. Only words

describe past as history. Lozenges of paint

are ignorant of irony, are the colour

of time. One late and sunlit afternoon, a child

follows a butterfly into oblivion.

Another Place ©SCES 2008

We crunch through razor shells and squelch through

blackish silt – there is coal in the drenched sand -

to reach the artist’s cast iron avatars.

They are steadfast against anglers, vandals,

local Tories, jet skiers, the Coastguard,

and the RSPB – but not the wind

or the sea. Some are rusting deeply,

some barnacled already, some sinking

or rising – others missing on this

shifty shore. They have watched the North Sea.

Now, from here, they can see Snowdonia,

The Skerries, Queenstown, the New World -

and, some, when the tide is in, sea creatures

in their wilderness of oblivion.

Above, ships pass and the wind farm turns.

I can see the back room in the shared flat:
sagging bed, faded armchair, torn carpet,
wobbly table; I’d brought a large ashtray,
a glass fronted bookcase and a small, handmade
Chinese cabinet; a tv blared upstairs.
Through the sash window stuck fast with paint
was the littered garden – out of sight and
sound, all of Liverpool, swinging city.

I google Lorenz Hart’s lyrics – ‘Your looks
are laughable, unphotographable,
Yet you’re my favorite work of art’- and hear
Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald.
The cabinet – carved drawers filled now with years
of love – was a woman’s gift to a man
coming of age. But I was a boy, full
of fears and words. ‘Stay little valentine, stay…’
Borne on the leafy fretwork of the doors,
two gilded, lacquered kingfishers in flight,
sun catching on their iridescent wings,
fall together into oblivion.