From dendrites of samphire,
salt-marsh mind,
I run to the edge again,
to old Gloucester's cliff
to screw up eyes and peer dizzyingly down,
hearing an odd voice in the looped wind:-
a disowned child, father of the man.
Myself my own trickster,
willfully misconstruing a broody syntax;
from ponderous roughage
conjuring a silk
irreverent, abstracted smile,
starting motor of a belly laugh
at my pompous silences,
hiding in dark corners, grinning behind grim masks.
Hundreds of sheer feet below
another samphire roots
succulent in cracks of our compressed grit-stone,
gathered by spirit figments, wholly, no one can claim.
Their forms lance from entrancing tongues:-
salt surge of ecstatic tears
forever foundering.
Leaping,
to jar on shrill, scolding grind of imagined shingle,
from the breast-high plummet,
bruised feet stamping back balance,
I am glad to be thwarted.
..............................................
The Earl of Gloucester in King Lear, blinded, is guided by his good son to jump off this beetling cliff to commit suicide. But the cliff is is really a tiny jump. Gloucester's good son, Edgar, tricks him to save him. I play on two kinds of samphire here. Marsh sampire is 'glasswort'. Rock samphire, also edible, is golden samphire which grows on rocky cliffs.
"King Lear - Act 4 Scene 6
Edgar:
Come on, sir. Here’s the place. Stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down
Hangs one that gathers samphire—dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice...."
YOU ARE READING
Tapestries
PoetryPoems 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.
