Bridge: Albert
Title: Albert Bridge
Writer: Stuart Delves
Creative partners: Sam Gray, Typoretum
The work: 1 of 1 – 427 x 550mm, traditionally letterpressed on Caxton Cream Laid Antique paper, presented in an aged emerald-green frame with bevelled gold inlay, and finished with Artglass 70.
Description: Two poems – one in the voice of Prince Albert, the other in the voice of the bridge. They face each other like the opposite banks of the Thames. In typography, a river is the name for a distracting trail of white space that runs vertically through a justified paragraph, created when gaps between words align across consecutive lines. Here, the negative space between the end of one line and the beginning of the next becomes the river itself – a quiet channel flowing between the voices of A and B.
ALBERT BRIDGE
Stuart Delves
Albert
I like to think
Or should I say I liked to think
When I had thought
And had what I thought
Was a blessed life
Happy children
A devoted wife
And purpose if not command
Yes, I like to think I was a practical man
Ein praktischer Mensch
Well briefed so well armed
But also an engineer of dreams
Ein Träumingenieur
So when the old bridge was coming apart at the seams
Vulnerable to ship and storm to be sure
I imagined a new dawn:
Carriages in the sky
Above, cargo across the water.
And I’m told by the angels
And those who come after
The first being my daughter
With her harpsichord laughter
That the bridge, my bridge
That they called after me
Is the prettiest bridge across the Thames
From Trewsbury Mead out to the sea.
History paints me as a moral man,
Some say I manipulated the queen
Though I like to think I had the reason to convince
And that she knew me as reasonable rather than mean.
Anyhow, I cut quite a dash as a young prince!
Ein Beau
And charming too, I’ll have you know.
But how blessed is a man that leads a charmed life
And a charmed afterlife too?
‘Oh Albert’ I can hear my mother say:
‘Don’t be so vain, it doesn’t become you.’
But it’s hard mother
When every day a thousand footsteps
Remind me of myself, again and again.
Mutter doesn’t mince her words:
‘Get over yourself Albert,
Each of us is a bridge.’
Maybe motherkins, Mutterchen, but I’m still the prettiest.
Ask Vicky.
Bridge
Clop, clop, thud
Shuffle, click, clack
Vroom ~ noise below
In the wings of me
Ribs of steel wire
The wetted wind and the starlight
Birds of Thames
Worms of mud
On the back of me
And they said I wouldn’t hold,
Me a girl in a boy’s skeleton
Of iron, stronger than you think
Holding the endless flow
Of boot and hoof and tyre
Between Battersea and Chelsea
Chelsea, Battersea
Bank to bank
The vibration in me
In the hollow of my physics
London London London London
Never sleeps, but the dreams in me
The confetti of words thrown at me
By passing, laughing lovers passing
Through, passing over, ‘passing’
Is what they say, and the remains
In me are the remains of the night
In the return of the day
And the birds come:
Birds of Thames
Birds of Thames
Birds of Thames
Omens, some say
Pretty, pretty
Pretty, pretty
Pretty come, pretty go
The radar in me
In the rust of me, has heard it all before
But how long, called weak, but shown strong
But oh
How long will the bolts in me
The bolts and rivets and shards
Of engineering brain in me ~ hold
Before I too tumble into flowing
Thames, a worm in the beak of destiny.