My eighth book, Marriage, contained two sequences; the first was very loosely based on the relationship between the painter Pierre Bonnard and his lifelong companion and model Marthe de Meligny. I came to see that the sequence is concerned, as are many of Bonnard’s paintings, with what lies beneath the surfaces of the quotidian, what I call the mysteries of domesticity, and with the unsettling intensity with which an artist focuses on his subject. This is from the sequence, ‘Marriage’.
I perch on a ‘Bauhaus-style’ chrome and raffia
stool as you drop your knife and pause to consider
this fish and its fistula,
this fish with its deep deformity, its head like a cosh,
its raw flank and blood-brown eyes,
its lips of lopsided blubber,
this fish we are having for supper.
You laid out cold cash
to have them deliver this fish, close-packed in ice,
a glacier coelacanth preserved against all the odds,
as if some throw of the dice, some coin
turning a thousand years to come down heads,
had brought to the marble slab in our kitchen
of all kitchens this fish, sporting
its jowly truncheon-lump of sorbo rubber
and the great wet ulcer opening beneath its backbone.
As you start again, flensing good from bad, you let spill
a viscous flub of gut that slips
from your wrist to the marble, where it spells
out the hierogram most often linked
with the once in a lifetime, miraculous
descent of the goddess, her gills
crisp enough to cut as you trade kiss for kiss.
Flesh of her flesh, I’ll eat it if you will.
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