Ella Rose Muse: the story: Blue

Friday 22 April 2011

Blue

It's that time of year again... As soon as the bluebells arrived I alerted the various photographers who were on standby and squeezed in some arrangements for early morning/evening shoots. These flowers don't wait around long; you've got to be on their schedule. They're such a pleasure to sit in; I try my hardest to squish as few as possible in the place I now call 'my bluebell patch' and have taken to spritzing my self with Elle Macpherson's 'Calming bath and body oil', lavender scented, to discourage any bluebell-loving insects from settling on me.

I don't care that I've done this type of bluebell shoot before and still have many more coming up over the next ten days - one of the things I love about these short woodland sessions is that, somehow, each photographer always seems to get completely different results, whether by using different angles, wanting different themes or just because the light is so changeable, varying itself in intensity and colour minute by minute. I love the morning mist. It turns out I'm shit at getting up early unless shooting, so I love the fact that these 6am alarm calls are kick-starting me back towards my new year's resolution with a vengeance. It's an amazing feeling to be back at home having done a good 'day's' work when most people are just setting off for theirs. :-)

I've already received some images from Mike Castle, who is primarily a traveller (not the irish kind) and secondarily a photographer. He likes things not to be overly posed, preferring a beautiful scene with a girl in it, rather than a girl posing in a scene. This was my third shoot with him (see here and here for previous stuff). I love the relaxed feel and bokeh in these (and am delighted to be able to use one of the few technical terms I know, photography-wise). Here goes:

Lean and stooped, clumped at the feet

of elephantine trunks, by scrubby roots

and washing open spaces, grow

the bluebells. Emitting

periwinkle, leaving stains

on butterfly tongues, they knit together,

their dense heads close,

soaked overnight like pooled ink.

In sun they wisp, slight and arcing

as if to say there’s nothing to see;

this is what we do. As if being blue

means nothing more than reflecting

sky. On the ground, the clouds are spaces

to be grown in, hushed, amassed; barren

blanks to be sewn up,

like bubbles linking in water.

We then found some blossom:

It's Good Friday today - Happy Easter everyone!

Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Natasha Khan/Bat for Lashes, 'Horse and I'

Got woken in the night,
by a mystic golden light.
My head soaked in river water.
I had been dressed in a coat of armor. They called
a horse out of the woodland.
"Take her there, through the desert shores."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear.
You're the chosen one, there's no turning back now."

The smell of redwood giants.
The banquet for the shadows.
Horse and I, we're dancers in the dark.
Came upon the headdress.
It was gilded, dark and golden.
The children sang.
I was so afraid I took it to my head and prayed.
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."

Mark Doty, 'A Display of Mackerel'

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other

—nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even now

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

Kate Clanchy, 'Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell'

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my hand
smells like the feel of an old school desk,
the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scent
my armpits sound a bass note strong
as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,
on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck, just where you might bend
your head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet
of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.

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Friday 22 April 2011

Blue