Poetry from the Bailey

Bygone wonder of the Ancient World:

Bronze man astride the harbour, maybe

shielding sun from your

eyes

with one of those colossal hands that

people

After your fall

Clung to the fingers of,

Being painted next to remembering your

bloodless glow.

You dazzled in sunlight, but how did you

look at Nighttime

Like a man too large for this life, all

Shadowed and unknowable—

After your fall

People flocked to your broken body and

they stood inside it,

curious to feel the scale now tipped onto

earth all

Hollow spare the rocks that kept you grounded.

They stole your bronze because it was

precious and they melted

you down,

Made you liquid, sold you on. I wonder if

There are smaller men made of your

matter now

After your fall

Sitting on the shelves of big houses facing

the sun everyday and

unable to shield themselves from it,

part of your shine shared across

continents.

I wonder that you multiplied like that

because I find myself

standing

Inside those bronze colossal limbs now

Sleeping inside your arms.

After your fall one could say that you

became more than your

legend

(Because we have all wanted what

we cannot have)

But I have this precious home that your

molten heart flowed into

and cast a new form in.

I wonder if the way that I inhabit you is

strange

I climb around your frame– I do not need

it drawn for me–

But I cannot map your mind, the great

unknowable part of all

mankind and I wonder if

After it all

I will find it strange that there was a time

when you were a

wonder to me and I to you,

Rather than it being as it is now.

You had painted your nails

the green of the trees

that once held the sky

in our garden in Saint-Tropez.

Years had slipped by—

your hair, gold thinned by time,

still caught the sun.

Your husband waited in the lobby.

Polite. Kind.

A marine biologist,

with gentle hands

and a love of cephalopods.

He showed me the purple octopi

he keeps in a tank beneath the stairs—

their slow, alien grace,

how they pulse and drift,

changing colour as if thinking.

His eyes gleamed

the way a child’s might.

I could not help but like him.

That night, in the hotel,

I closed my eyes

and summoned the sea—

aquamarine,

azure, cerulean surge,

each wave a cathedral

crumbling in foam.

I saw us again,

knees in the sand,

gathering shells,

crab claws, salt-caked weed,

to crown the castle

you built with wet hands

and fierce concentration.

We are older now.

I live across the sea.

Books and music

fill the quiet hours

that drift like dusk

through shuttered light.

I am happy, I think.

But I saw—

you had painted your nails

the green of Saint-Tropez trees.