The summer after my ninth birthday I crouched, knees scratched, and peered through a brambled loophole in my grandmother's blackberry bush as a quail and her chicks darted across the driveway.But where now is the spondee of the steam boiler, the hemiola of the prop shaft, which hissed and churned as stubby Monitor met proud Merrimack on the chlorinated wash of Nana’s pool? Draped in the clementine toga of a Senator’s daughter, I slip my copper basin into the courtyard pool, and rise in a chilly London kitchen to find, cradled in its quavering, eternity. Then, perched on the tailgate of an old Ford, legs swinging in the summer air and hands chalky with gravel dust, I will lift to my thin lips the pearly chill of a Klondike Bar.
Beau Gabriel is a painter based in London.