When I savour notions of an after-life,
no longer pestering intellect to spin
glittering webs 'cross burrows of my fear,
embroidered with fine dew of self-conceits
(for Terror merely stirs his little finger,
winks one red eye and assertion runs witless;
his rhetoric is fluent as a quicksand;
and he may have the last word if he wishes),
I'll think of Prestatyn and wading knee deep
in the dirty mud across from Liverpool,
flapping my arms like an oily-winged curlew,
and every reluctant step following you,
perilous with delight in childish horror
of lumps and gobbets squeezed between my toes,
firming with yelps the seeming ground I stood on
(perhaps only one, foot-shaped half-certainty)
wondering when you would be gobbled down live -
all to reach a hump of sand by the mucky sea,
But afterwards came death of an unguessed kind:-
cities and schoolrooms and recurrent quarrels,
elucidated like a past delusion,
washed and bleached, strewn cuttlebone*....
For that short time without miserly measure,
lost in the coruscating needles of light,
strolling at bedazzled ease through shallow pools,
two new animals, we discovered treasures.
...............................
'cuttlebone' is a long-ovoid internal shell of a cuttlefish used for buoyancy.
YOU ARE READING
Tapestries
PoesíaPoems from 1978 onwards. These poems are in a different style from the later MajorSeventh, the earlier ones often with more of an Eastern-influenced cadence. Later, they vary a lot in form and style.
