STAINING CHAIRS -

STAINING CHAIRS

At the back of the house, on a warm day -
With the blue plastic-covered seats removed -
Using a dye, I stain three wooden chairs;
With a cloth, I paint well-worn furniture:
Old skeletons of kitchen cosiness.
My stroke transfers the tin-bottled newness:
The pine wood darkens, accepts the brown blood;
The varnish smell vinegars the odd breath.
Rough grain, scratches and knots come up richly:
Like tea-stain blemishes, or large face-moles,
Or the ripe shells of leathery conkers.
My cloth is a slice of bread that’s gravied.
They stand like stiff statements of emptiness.

The empty chairs of Van Gogh come to mind:
Both finished in December - Child Christ’s month.
Vincent’s yellow chair, painted in daylight,
With prepared tobacco, impotent pipe,
Attempts to portray domestic calmness.
Gaugin’s, painted by night, is an armchair;
Darker and stronger in green and red tones.
It boasts two books and a lighted candle:
A bright symbol of confident maleness.
Both chairs a foretelling of future blood.
The unknown carpenter, who made the chairs,
Was content that his work offered comfort.
But these empty chairs make one think of death.

I recall The Black Chair, the empty Chair.
That Hedd Wyn won in Nineteen Seventeen:
His poem, posted five weeks earlier,
Was written on the subject The Hero.
Hedd Wyn was not to hear the trumpet call;
The summoned poet had been killed in France:
Ellis Evans, Welsh soldier, was dead;
His life a mere line to his white peace.
The large gathering sat in shocked silence;
The ceremony’s Chair was draped in black:
Like some charred work of art proclaiming grief.
The cloak of death served only emptiness.

My grandmother had a favourite chair;
Wooden, it had arms and was painted blue.
It stood by her single bed and wardrobe;
Each night she sat in it: to take tablets;
Maybe consider her eighty-two years.
She was lying by it when they found her:
Dying from a stroke, hypothermia.
I saw it weeks after her funeral,
In a corner of a relative’s room:
A reminder of absence caused by death;
Emptiness skilfully sculptured in wood.

I think of wood growing in a forest:
The slow image of spreading bark and green.
And then of the fine art of carpentry.
As someone made these chairs that I revive,
Someone fashioned the necessary Cross;
Like fallen forests veining underground,
The Cross has stained man’s conscience with darkness.
A cross, like a chair, is commissioned work:
So much required wood, essential tools,
Estimated hours, careful labour,
And the waste: the sawdust that’s shed like blood.
Existence is the nailing to the wood:
We move from emptiness to emptiness.

The afternoon heat dries the seatless chairs.
Hours later, I shine them up like shoes
That have been wax-skinned with dark tan-polish;
My wife scrubs clean the grubby, plastic blue.
We position them around the table
(The old table they now match in colour);
They wait for us to fill their emptiness.
With soap and hot water I try to cleanse
My nicotined nails, my stained butcher’s hands.

Log in

STAINING CHAIRS