Under cumuli looming
with all the visioned reportage
I bring to them, so blood-cultured
and out of key,
inshore rollers flashing
white, beautiful smiles,
low gull-wings curling over marsh tufts,
blithe wry raucous cries,
eloquent sun-skies,
mauve-grey pastel mud puffed
by shallow boot-step over shining gravel –
a pebble, a jewel –
bedded in sea-sway mud-marsh
round scattered seed and spore,
this April fool-walk sucked
to a gumboot rim,
vistas of alchemic wilderness,
tideways that twice daily
eclipse the heart,
bird-man tracked,
feather traced
old seventh seawash stubble.
Who am I to receipt?
Waiting, watch down-feather
pulled through fluid weed-fronds,
fingertip surface ruche
dancing a piano
skin chord of wind and current
such dinted tints and sparkles,
dulled, leaden razored
in shivering modulation –
looking far out to fair-weather
cemetery headstones of tideline gulls
on abortive ventures
rain-lashed, testing the channel's depth,
madness measured by uncovered stones
before I can cross,
trudging wide tidal plains to mingle
graveled sadness with broad
waves' embracing cadences,
meditate shallows of receding sea-lap
on the farthest littoral
swirled with starfish disasters.
On the final channel's
rilled lower lip,
a mother mouth feeding her gulls
swathed in concealing dismal,
adjust my sou'wester to the needling drizzle,
with bright shells marking emerging sand humps,
survival counters.
Gulls and terns flap flock away
from such floundering,
flailing, bowing
to the uncertainty of all seeming-paths
and to the crazy folly of
entrepreneuring
among moon-water fringes
for no gold.
With now no bar to journey but exhaustion
phantasmal rhapsody of memories
drift half conscious over sea-print pools.
Waking, I find myself
making for dune shelter -
tormented boot-steps
raught between contacts,
breath between poundings,
heart between beat -
the feat of living,
wind-picked and starveling
by the sea gate,
shadow mantled by
a host of uncertain personas
seeded from this moment's
hapless grit -
to say to wave-shelved storied selves,
'Look through these eyes!' or to integrate
such sanderling, dismissive cries.
Frightening field-edge swans
with mute assertiveness,
a bridgehead is all I can claim,
to share the scent of pussy willow catkins
with a little enraptured fly.
YOU ARE READING
Tapestries
PuisiPoems 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.
