museums9

The York Museum’s upper room Is full of paintings set in gloom with things grotesque laid on the desk Reminding us of certain Doom Here a Still Life is arranged with items , morbid , sick and strange Brought out from store For us to draw And every night it’s slightly changed Today a skull sits on a velvet drape Reminding us there’s No Escape and arranged By hand deranged In one eye sits a glassy grape A spinning globe in shadow stands Mapping out those other lands Come to dust As we must There’s an end to travel plans In this Live Memento Mori Here’s a sprig of Morning glory with butterflies Though the eyes Winding like a horror story Two silver cups lie , fallen , there Once they seemed a happy pair Someone died - of cyanide Here’s evidence of deep despair All this troubled living flesh Won’t be kept forever fresh It will rot Like as not Putrify and make a mess There’s an ornamental vase Holding lilacs and some pears You will die So will I So let us all just say our p

There is something disruptive about the Rotunda that in its very formality is disturbing to space and to scale Here’s a Great Bustard - she was shot in 1839 . They got her mate as well They were the last pair in the county ,and now they are extinct but here she’s stuffed in such a lifelike stance Not reproachful , more like - curious . Its so easy to be outstared by eyes of glass The next case holds the ammonites , devils toenails and a coloured map of Yorkshire showing different types of rock A poster made in printers letters for the Smith and Phillips lectures on Geology , Sponsored by the Scarborough Philosophical Society . Held Monday , Wednesday in the Town Hall - also Friday - One o’ clock  A cello large and bulbous with a darkly gleaming polished shell The strings are thick and knotted - lifted by a bridge and ending in the tail and spike for resting on the floor .It belonged to Mr Johnson who was 104 when he died in Scarborough .There are f-holes in the cello where the body s

This city is built on clay and silt Beside a wide and winding river - this is the skull of an auroch  the ancient hulking ox with flaring horns Wider than a taxi cab A small bath tub - beside it is a human cranium almost like a hazelnut . Litter and remains Of a Roman city burned to ash by Boudica Here is typhoid , plague and cholera detected in a water pump By Dr Snow -- discoverer That epidemic is not spread by leaves or rotting cabbages Mysterious gases , Bad Night Air , but by leakings from unburied dead into drinking water and bacteria If there’s one theme in this museum - it’s disease and drains These sewers engineered with Vision - almost unimaginable in these make-do days - of water gushing through the ground Freely swishing human waste through tunnels Far wider than they ever thought There’d be a need And they were not expecting this - or were they ? For this is where the fatberg’s lurking A bad dream growing underground Longer than three buses - found pulsating in its an

Sir John Soane Museum Hidden off the busy street By a quiet London square A woman’s sitting on a bench  a Scottie dog runs round and chases leaves Its cold - but then its January - In a town house - leave your mobile at the door And your luggages and bags For passing through the corridors No photography’s allowed It’s lit by candles and by daylight - no electricity The light flows in through glass that’s tinted yellow ,blue and ochre The ancient light of Tuscany and Rome Funnelled down and led by mirrors Onto a wild array of marble and of chiselled stone As if they grow here in their eccentricity In wild fungi of wondrous forms Of wounded hart and plaster casts Of saints and Apollonian youths Of putti and of emperors Of catafalques , philosophers Of stately matrons and a skull Until it falls On gleaming , smoothly marbled walls The light comes flooding down a well And this is winter - out - beyond the doors In here its always Italy It is a text book in 3D

 The Iron Age. Hesiod believed he and his contemporaries were in the Iron Age, an age of desolation, destruction and pain. Humans would fight against each other and would only care of themselves. Because of lack of shame and indignation, humankind would destroy itself, and the gods would abandon them. In the Rotunda is a walrus skull a fossil found in Yorkshire gravel Its brain filled up a cavity - size of a dog - the solid bone for slamming others of its kind - as yard long tusks go ripping down through wrinkled hides . A piggy eye surveys the heaving beach of water wives . Those were the days of tusks - the mastodon had tusks that raked along the earth . The narwhal grows a tooth to needle spike for feeling out the fractures in the ice and then it carves a hole and breathes . The giant cats with sabre teeth pounce heavily on giant sloth on plains awash with purple sage and armadillos roll along Like tanks and tiny horses in uncounted herds - defenceless - oh bu

I am sweeter than ashes a rose in the desert . In chains , a leopard . In history a war that never happened ... they all went home . I am your yesterdays , over and over , a memory lodged in the back of your skull . It is time . You are a squirrel that buried an acorn in the roots of an oak tree and never remembered until it was too late . I am a cat in the dark , a tumbling star that got caught in the branches and sitting there , burning , I’ve learned how to stare . I am rain a dot on the horizon that grows as you watch it a howl from the hill and a tooth from a crocodile . Twenty five in the light , Eight hundred in darkness , a hundred and fifty in something that’s neither I’ve been wrapped in my skin for a thousand years , It is time I was wrapped up in yours October 2018

With chubby legs – each terminating in a fat and scaley fin the coelacanth in Belfast lives in a tank to keep the liquor in the giant squid with stretching arms to grasp and suck and swallow the Malone Hoard of polished axe heads found abandoned in a hollow migrating birds , sand martins , swifts – that fly although they’re stuffed and warthogs with more tusks than looks with bodies ending in a tuft hyenas laughing silently at terrible hyena jokes and cases full of scenes of daily life of Neolithic folks and stripey piglets milling round a huge and bristled hog the elk with spreading antlers that was found preserved entirely in a bog with tiny head and great big feet and hair made from fleeces a sign that says " please do not touch or this display may fall to pieces ” nor do not touch Triceratops – it may look fierce but it is much ….. less replaceable than you are . I like the Irish Furniture , such skill to inlay oyster shells in smooth and polished sycamore wood The painti

The Hare in the Museum In the museum Over there - across the room On top of a locked cupboard Is a hare Its ears are nothing special , hardly longer than its tail Which is really just a tuft , but its legs are Long , longer , longest ,  very long - but not long enough , or it would not be there In the museum - on top of the locked cupboard , Stuffed . A.   G 14/08/2019

This is no fairy tale of old With spinning wheels and flax of gold Glistening like Viking hair Shining in the morning air It ’ s tales of lint pools , legs in slime bare and leaches clinging Tales of rotting in the rain Of retting , scutching , Cutting hooks Drizzle on the bleaching green  , pain and Roses roses all the way To ruination and decay A palace called the Bagatelle Things fall apart - the centre slips away Another cold and rainy day Another hot and rainless day …...