Poems written as part of site-specific project in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter - during residency as the Poetry Society's Public Art Poet.
Alchemies
1. Birmingham Goldsmith
Each morning with a click of bicycle chain
he leaves her at the mangle in the grey backyard
the fire-fly of his fag-end disappearing in the dark
like a hot kiss.
The streets smell of coal-dust and sleep
and Orion is still bedded down behind the gasometer,
as men spill from the yellow-throated doorways hunkered
beneath flat caps, dreaming of frowsty sheets.
All day beneath the zircon blue of kerosene
he sits nailed to the wooden bench
by his leather apron spread to catch
the gilt-edge dust that pollens
His skilled fingers saffron
as he buffs and burnishes 9ct curbs
and belcher chains, chaises the bevels
of machine-turned rings for the other women’s hands.
All morning she heaves grey underwear
from aluminium to windy washing line
wiping suds from raw fingers
onto her flowered apron to wait
for meter-men, agents with rent books
as dogs bark their arrival up the windy ally.
Her back aches. What she needs is sleep
as she pictures him washing the aureate dust
from his sweat-soaked hair, his white body
bent above the pantry sink, wet head
shimmering beneath the kitchen lamp,
Archangel in a halo of gold.
2. The Jeweller's Mistress
At night in her white bed
she dreams of piercing
his electroplated heart,
annealing its gilded armour
into liquid gold.
In the dark she would burnish
his sharp corners, the soldered seams
that hem him in,
planish and polish with pumice
and fine sand his jagged exterior
on her spinning felt bob,
sink her die like sharp teeth
into his new softness,
engrave her name
across his chest decorating
the chasing with a tattoo
of translucent Champleve
or Baisse-taille, then hallmark
his Millgrain
with her own secret stamp;
a lion passant, behind
the pink whorl of his left ear.
3. The Assayist
Each evening he takes his
small failures, isolating
what was jewel-like, precious,
the topaz slant of winter light
across the dim hall, a drop of rain
patinating a pigeon’s wing,
from the day’s dark mass,
placing it in a cupel of bone ash
in the furnace’s fiery maw.
This is true alchemy,
not mere pinchbeck promises
or the transmutation of fool’s gold.
Solids melt. What is base
oxidises, absorbed as if by magic
until it yields a tiny bead
of dull gold. This he will cool,
flatten, roll, boil in nitric acid
to separate impure from pure.
Then he will weigh the residue
balancing the black ash
of midnight against the glint
of dawn, stamp his gleaming
bullion with its carat, an anchor,
three castles, a leopard’s head.
4. The Gold Cutter’s Daughter
That which you weave,
like Judea’s first goldsmith,
Bezalel, into vineleaves of gold,
I wear threaded in my thick dark hair.
Among these damp brick streets,
these pigeon-coloured days,
you pierce my coral ear and fix it with
a little Gold Star,
so they may know me for what I am
a stranger. My mouth fills with feathers, a weight
of foreign words. At night I dream of forests,
smell the quite darkness of snow.
© Sue Hubbard