Sally's Greg

Rennick: Prints of Prints Taped on the Wall by Sally Cooper I It started with a bridge he crossed and crossed again with friends who loved him in Amsterdam and ended with him devoured, the thread dropped in the labyrinth. It started with feathers and trefoils, fleurs-de-lis, poppies, paisleys, leaves and grass blades – the exuberance of pattern – and ended with striped tents and fence rails, black branches, floorboards, beams and looming cats, with him stepping off the secret path. And despite their ebullient love, his dissolution, a slow fade into sheets.                                                                                        II He was rejected by the colour green, the way light sits on the higher, translucent leaves, while the ones below cluster dark, coarser, supportive. Yet wood yielded to him. His tools gliding made grooves. The veins of leaves bunched behind limbs beckoned. The cat climbed into the tree then called out until boy after boy swung up after it. A lady in a black dress raised her arms and shouted Pete! and there was talk of phoning the volunteer firefighters. He saw the oppressiveness of branches, the grace of chaos. The wickedness of cats. III He loved the muscled thigh of a model nude, his artists’ eyes inky jars, limpid with dreams, manga-large. Often there are three. One hesitates in the front, another untangles wind-torn hair on the horizon. A third, oblivious. Hands reach, soak in bowls of liquid, sketch a shoulder’s curve, hang limp and console. Each pattern, each outsized feeling, lies upon another. Flowers cluster and spiral and repeat so it could get disorienting if you hadn’t dropped crumbs on the path. Anyone might get lost, tangle with the monster and not find the way home.   IV He wants one woman, but he has another. She wants the man whose tie her sister knots before the dance. He wants the dreamy boy robed like him. She wants the man whose children his wife has hired her to watch. He hangs his head, having made a pass at the bride in the tent at her wedding reception. He wants a woman whose likeness he collects. She wants her words to matter but can not tell the difference between who she is and who everyone else thinks she is. He is sinking into his bed, the patterns replicating themselves  on sheets and dresses and in the sky, consuming him no matter how much everyone wants him to be who they want.  No matter how hard he wishes to pin down precisely who that is. V The bookseller stands by herself, flanked by book spines and two scheming cats. She looks like a poet I met in another country and reminds me of that time upstairs at the Harbord Street store where I’d come to find a collection of stories recommended by another writer, not the poet. Behind me, a book fell to the floor. I hustled over and checked the title. As I turned away,  another book landed with a soft thuck. The ghost got it right the second time: it was the collection I had come there to find. Monk-like and protective, the woman trapped by cats has heard spirits, too, but she is afraid –as he was, and I am, too – to turn around and find herself alone. VI I sat in a star-patterned armchair in the corner, prints of his prints taped on three blue walls, and surveyed the repression of rooms, the beautiful rooms of repression. The story captured me as much as the world beyond the frames – the feet, knees, backs and legs; the breasts and shadows; the trees, windows and clouds – shut me out. This darkness I’ve shouldered, a dear man like him lost to me, too. So many lines carved in a woodcut. So much mischief and charm. And so much longing. [Distillate © HA&L + Sally Cooper  |  {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life. |  A Portfolio of works by Greg Rennick]