Giles Watson's photos

The Wings of Blodeuwedd (Poem by Giles Watson.) Now I see them everywhere: her wings raised for the moment when she plummets out of sky, and the rodent squeals. Her eye is in the clouds, and the wind has whipped a wisp into her bill. I lie prone on sand: Gwydion who was Enchanter, and is now drained. That is the stain where I spilled my potion on her flowers; those gouged-in prints are where I screamed out, “Wake!” and she rose before me naked and defiant with the quills already breaking through her skin, one magnificent mistress of pure will. Oh, and how it scuttles here below. I had to plead to keep her from the kill, and now there is no fear it does not know.

A Promise of Orchids Today, there are no other footprints but my own, the long sand stippled with raindrops. The ocean's slow edge is smooth with foam, hissing faintly as the bubbles break, and the backsurge rushes under. From here, my way leads over granite, to where the peppermints arch over, backlit and shimmering, and the gnarled torsos of Nuytsias silhouette themselves. The path will be spangled with sundews, bladderworts, blushing, puppet-mouthed, heedless insects beheld through slits in geckos' eyes. There may yet be signs of the season's first snakes, and in those single, scrolled and fleshy leaves, a promise of orchids. Poem by Giles Watson, 2015.

Perching My world has become a watermark in rice-paper. Everything substantial has melted. Last night, the spring tide rose up over the road, washed away all evidence, and never withdrew. The moon had lost all influence; winds hushed into extinction. Land and waters grew confused. I hovered over the face of the deep, as at the Beginning, before the Earth grew blue and spinning. Only this remnant pierced the surface – a tear in the one pure fabric – no more than a twig and its angled echo and reflection. Here I perch, eternal. Even the hills are mirage and refraction. Poem by Giles Watson, 2015.

Whetted Black-backed gull on your watching-stone with the tide all around you and the sunlight glancing through the foam, I love how you half-turn to look at me without bothering to shift your legs or raise a wing, then switch your gaze back towards the tanker, chafing at its anchor in the Sound, and beyond it, that white wedge of sail, and I wonder what you think of these quaint contrivances and this camera which glints its blinkless eye at you, catching the sea in mid-spit, and its smoothness as it surges over stones – but more likely, gull, you don’t give a shit: I’m dismissed almost instantly: not a food- source after all, and what other interest is there in human beings when at any instant you could unfold yourself like a penknife all stropped and whetted and slicing into sky? Poem by Giles Watson, 2015.

Gleanings Walking in the heathland by the ocean, I crouched to photograph a flower, my heart all forgetfulness, and left my notebook at its roots, wandering on, then realised its absence with a shock somewhere close to the end of my walk, rushed back down the strand and stumbled on a clump of wood, pockmarked by shipworms, its rivets corroded, concreted, jarrah blackened by long immersion, and knew it in an instant for a fragment of that sand-flensed whaleboat carcass half-submerged in beach, clenched it to my chest and hurried on. And almost where I started, there it was: this marble-papered, brass-clasped book I write in now. I don’t know which caused the greater leap within me, but I drove home exultant with these two heart-sized handfuls on the seat beside me: careless, new-found gleanings which once were growing trees. Poem by Giles Watson, 2015.

Woman Seated in the Underground, 1941 She has been knitted out of wax, hands unnaturally small: this Norn of worry, sitting separate from the others, turned away from the tunnel’s vortex. Her fingers pinch each other; I think her nails are bitten. Instead of eyes, she has absences, borrowing the tunnel’s blackness. Her children are all evacuees: that’s why she’s the only one who’s not reclining. Incendiaries just ate her house, her street’s all shrapnelled, every window shattered, and the washing hangs in shreds, but none of that matters: what haunts her is the smell of trains, and how her daughters wept, their nowheres scrawled on luggage-tags. Poem by Giles Watson, 2015. Inspired by a drawing by Henry Moore.

Man in a Cave I hollowed it out with my own hands. The sandstone was soft enough, so I only lost my nails. I’m amazed at myself: how heedless I was to pain. The way above is sunken, hedged with thorns and a needling grizzle of gorse. After the chase, my trail smells more of fox than any man’s; I too have learnt to squat watchful over my spraint. Should anyone shine a light, I’ll hang my head, so my pupils do not glow. See – my shoulders have moulded to rock; my muscles might be sediments, this flesh a brown compaction of trodden English earth. If I emerged in daytime, birds would perch on me, worms curl under my feet, and if it rained, I’d grizzle into loam, but I’m safe here, and almost righteous. I’ll not come forth to see what holocausts have raged, since I went to earth. Poem by Giles Watson, 2015. Inspired by Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male (1939) and Keith Vaughan’s painting, Man in a Cave (1943).

Slack Water Before I spotted him, the egret had already tilted his compass half-toward me, his almost- still reflection questionable only at the head-end, where it quibbled with the shadow of a stone. That was five minutes ago. He hasn’t budged, although the gulls have slightly shuffled so rushes leave their sightlines unimpeded, and one has made a bow wave. Another contemplates his ripple-whorl – a fingerprint in surface-tension – his friends on stilts. At first I thought their nonchalance was feigned. Now, I’ve admitted all seven of them are going to win this stand-off; they have stared me out, and just a second ago, the tide lost nerve completely. I back off into real-time, if that is what this flux is truly called, and leave them immortal, pointing north forever, perfect in slack-water. Poem by Giles Watson, 2015.

Heading Out And then the surge was calling, so she woke out of that caged quiescence, her long throat telescopic, the cool rubber of her paddles flailing – and it was all weighed up inside us both, this chosen moment which might be everything: a shearwinged glory, or merest drowning. I felt the urge thrill through her that said: I’ll risk it, and if I wash up slack- necked, feathers waterlogged to blackness, rolled in shallows, flight-miming in aqua, at least I chose to be dying wild. So, I let go, and now she’s far out beyond Mistaken Island. That’ll be her: that fleck of raggedness and minor hope, at the edge of darker water. Poem by Giles Watson, 2015.