Matthew Griffiths

The Interview

Today’s great sculptor chips a word

from silence. And it clatters.

She opens dusty air my question stirred.

 

She fills its space now as I listen,

as syllables drop round steel-toed boots,

her mallet kissing chisel kissing

 

stone, to take it out from under

forms that hang like heavy acrobats

off each other. Then words have stunned her –

 

but my dictaphone takes her voiced

thoughts to its heart, its spool gets fatter,

magnetised with weighty noise.

 

Geology dusts her face. I see

her grained fingertips swipe

a line along her lips, down through one eye,

 

letting the colour show.

It breaks the moment’s mask,

makes her a pierrot.

 

I hear the trucks begin to collect

whole conversations of her offcasts

while the spool rolls on, towards Select-

 

ed Recollections of a Great Sculptor.

How I’ll decipher, when I come to type,

her chunky commentary on culture

 

from all the noise dust, I cannot know.

But I’ll make words tell what her figures show.