Sugar-flesh and -bone

Lowther
Forced myself to go out for an evening cycle along the top road (extra blip) after work and getting back from a meeting in Carlisle. Got an OT referral sorted for dad and did their shop online this evening so it was good to see some evening sun for a bit.

I'm not a fan of Lowther but it was looking imposing in the late sun although it always feels a bit sinister and a bit rotten at the core. Like Harewood it was involved in the slave trade with plantation estates in Barbados. Ironically it is just a few miles from Eusemere where 'slave trade' Clarkson lived for some time, friend of Wordsworth's and the significant activist in the anti-slave trade movement.

The Doll's House by Patience Agbabi

The source of the wealth that built Harewood is historical fact. There is nothing anyone can do to change the past, however appalling or regrettable that past might be. What we can do, however, what we must do, is engage with that legacy and in so doing stand a chance of having a positive effect on the future. – David Lascelles

Art is a lie that makes us realise truth. – Pablo Picasso

Welcome to my house, this stately home
where, below stairs, my father rules as chef:
confecting, out of sugar-flesh and -bone, 
décor so fine, your tongue will treble clef 
singing its name. Near-sighted and tone-deaf,
I smell-taste-touch; create each replica 
in my mind’s tongue. My name? Angelica. 

This is my world, the world of haute cuisine:
high frosted ceilings, modelled on high art,
reflected in each carpet’s rich design; 
each bed, each armchair listed à la carte.
Come, fellow connoisseur of taste, let’s start
below stairs, where you’ll blacken your sweet tooth, 
sucking a beauty whittled from harsh truth...

Mind your step! The stairway’s worn and steep,
let your sixth senses merge in the half-light...
This muted corridor leads to the deep
recesses of the house. Here, to your right,
my father’s realm of uncurbed appetite –
private! The whiff of strangers breaks his spell. 
Now left, to the dead end. Stop! Can you smell

cinnamon, brown heat in the afternoon
of someone else’s summer? This rust key
unlocks the passage to my tiny room,
stick-cabin, sound-proofed with a symphony
of cinnamon; shrine to olfactory 
where I withdraw to paint in cordon bleu, 
shape, recreate this house; in miniature

All art is imitation: I’m a sculptor
of past-imperfect; hungry, I extract
molasses; de- and reconstruct high culture
from base material; blend art and fact
in every glazed and glistening artefact
housed in this doll’s house. Stately home of sugar.
Of Demerara cubes secured with nougat.

Look at its hall bedecked with royal icing –
the ceiling’s crossbones mirrored in the frieze, 
the chimneypiece. The floor is sugar glazing 
clear as a frozen lake. My centrepiece
statue of Eve, what a creative feast! 
A crisp Pink Lady, sculpted with my teeth, 
its toffee glaze filming the flesh beneath.

The music room’s my favourite. I make music
by echoing design: the violet-rose
piped ceiling is the carpet’s fine mosaic
of granulated violet and rose,
aimed to delight the eye, the tongue, the nose.
Even the tiny chairs are steeped in flavour
delicate as a demisemiquaver.

Taste, if you like, sweet as a mothertongue...
See how this bedroom echoes my refrain:
the chairs, the secretaire, commode, chaise longue, 
four-poster bed, all carved from sugarcane;
even the curtains that adorn its frame, 
chiselled from the bark, each lavish fold 
drizzled with tiny threads of spun ‘white gold’. 

The library was hardest. How to forge
each candied volume wafer-thin, each word
burnt sugar. In the midnight hours, I’d gorge
on bubbling syrup, mouth its language; learned
the temperature at which burnt sugar burned,
turned sweet to bitter; inked a tiny passage 
that overflowed into a secret passage, 

the Middle Passage; made definitive
that muted walkway paved with sugar plate, 
its sugar-paper walls hand-painted with 
hieroglyphs invisible as sweat
but speaking volumes; leading to the sweet
peardrop of a stairwell down and down
to this same room of aromatic brown

in miniature. Here, connoisseur, I’ve set
the doll, rough hewn from sugarcane’s sweet wood:
her choker, hardboiled sweets as black as jet; 
her dress, molasses-rich; her features, hard.
This handcarved doll, with sugar in her blood —
Europe, the Caribbean, Africa;
baptised in sugar, named Angelica,

has built a tiny house in Demerara
sugar grains secured with sugarpaste,
each sculpted room a microscopic mirror 
of its old self; and below stairs, she’s placed
a blind doll with kaleidoscopic taste,
who boils, bakes, moulds, pipes, chisels, spins and blows
sugar, her art, the only tongue she knows.