arts, literature

Hilde Onis: Full Stop.

Eighteen young Flemish and Dutch authors drew inspiration from the collection held by the Mauritshuis in The Hague. They looked at seventeenth-century paintings through an alternative historical lens which they then brought to life in short but powerful texts. For this poem, Hilde Onis was inspired by a still life by Willem Claesz Heda, a painter specialising in the depiction of materials. ‘Glass can be pulverised but will never be the sand it once was’

Full Stop.

1.
Somewhere in time a steel pipe lengthens
a glassblower’s windpipe into metres
a red-hot clump of quarried sand
confirms the timeless courage to shape something
in the air bubbles that disrupt the material
a fissure threatens.

2.
We know: the tongue is the very first tool
with which we learn about proximity
for want of language, babies try to understand objects
by putting them into their mouth
fleshy arenas prepare for
division, classification, order.

A painter can be a master
of depicting the materiality of things,
but can he also
clamp the inside of his cheek between his molars
without it showing on the outside?
I’d be surprised as this light hides nothing.

3.
Only open the mouth in case of a health problem
use this channel primarily to eat
remember why you possess a tongue and teeth.

Each morning we set the table with another tone,
arrange white bread in the pitch-black darkness
pile four pale, dried out slices of lemon
like a stack of poker chips
as long as all the surfaces are crystal-clear
on who ends up betraying whom again today.

4.
Glass can be pulverised
but will never be the sand it once was
in the future the dust will be used
to fill out popular beaches.

So the glassblower begins this morning before the mirror
with a flashlight on the uvula,
today he’ll invoke
the irrevocability of matter
the small punch bag dangles in the ring
lungs empty for a first draft.

• deBuren
• Hilde Onis
• Mauritshuis
• Willem Claesz Heda