i. The River
The coming night breathes an atmosphere
of childhood October in crisp light and wood-smoke,
and the guy ropes
sway in the harbour
while the black river pauses
between two tides,
shaping itself in shadow.
It is never changing, never the samethe
ancient trees of the rookery in silent commune
with the river’s
different darkness
when we pass, and this time,
an egg-speckled kestrel
bullied by swallows.
A field that was mysteriously full of nothing
once but poisoned sparrows, a convulsive rain,
is brown earth now,
would not disturb
the bubble in a spirit level,
with a manhole like
a navel at its middle.
We wonder how will the river change, escape
development, or work its careless necromancy
on the next ones to come hereand
who will watch its black dreams
shatter into figments
skulled and crossboned in light?
ii. Littoral
By the campsite, travellers’
greyhounds lick the junk they find
and sniff along a wall sprayed
RELEASE IRA PRISONERS
and further on, HANG THEM ALL.
I pass a line of bollards
stuck with blue stones off the beach
like pins on a pin-cushion.
The theme is blue, or slate-grey
maybe, like the tame sea isits
stones seem banded with blue
like pillows, mollified by
the sucked-in breath of the sea.
Its creamy exhalations
leave them quite unmoved, just bruised
darker by the toppling tide.
I stare, in a slate-grey mood,
pretending nothing’s realer
than the colour of the beachstones’
blueness. Which is less like
blue the further down you go.
I select seven of them,
seven stones totalling home:
a dark one scored with crazy
yellow strokes like fossil grass
or hopscotch on a pavement,
a flat one like a mountainridge
in outline, capped with snow,
one like a mesolithic
axe-head, but more beautiful,
smooth basalt flecked with sequins,
one crossed with mineral lines,
one rock ringed like a planet,
one riddled with reddish specks
the texture of crayon wax.
An ostrich-egg of granite.
