Wave

for Carol Ballenger

The whole idea of the wave is green,
is constructed out of eagerness,
needs no driving force,
only wind to drink in.
It is moved by any direction of wind
into free flow, fall about,
tumbling beautiful, trembling
and shattering into a lather
when it meets anything less mobile,
less sympathetic than itself;
when it meets things locked to the ground,
less volatile than air.
The whole idea is green,
one simple single momentum
like love – one unstoppable solution
pulling from deep down
beyond any sense of the sensible.
This is green
as new as that sensation before beginning,
shaped from the shape of never quite belonging,
yet being the shape of all things

Night Song at Riviere Towans

In the illusion
of galloping white horses,
hoof-prints are heartbeats.

We dream in the dunes
as each wave lifts to reflect
the faces of stars.

Ocean releases
white noise, tumbling like thunder;
deep and absolute.

Ocean Depths

Complete dark:
a black out,
intense,
denser than anywhere
we can go.

Unrecordable sound
travels ocean’s underbelly,
where stasis is
the muffled bell
of a sunken vessel.

Beneath blanket and blanket
of currents,
sea is a merchant
endlessly gathering
her trade.

Sunlight is of surface value.
Bulbous-eyed fish far below
tend a currency of sunken flesh.
Halos of luminescence,
their trinkets of gold.

Where Have All The Mermaids Gone?

Fisher boys and sailors
learnt the lore of the sea
block your ears to Mermaids
or drown-ed you will be.

It was quieter then
just the creaking of wooden ships,
the slap of sails,
ropes running through blocks,
a rattle of chains.

Steam changed all that,
whining screws
echoing through water,
they drowned your song.

Ships passing too fast,
so many of them,
the noise too great,
your siren voices smothered.

Fisher boys and sailors
no longer heeded
the lore of the sea.
You faded to myths
like mist in sunlight.

Untethered

A place on the edge
between land and sea,
the muted colours
of sharp thin blue
un-grazed saltings grass,
thrift and purple sea lavender,
grey sea-washed mudbanks;
salt tanging the air.

In the estuary
flocks of birds
wash in and out
with the tide.
The pale sky
meets the sea
in that liminal place
where boundaries merge,
one becoming the other,
like lying
drowsy on the shore
before the soft slide
into the tides of sleep,
carrying your dreams.

Love song

Above him we planted a small tree
leaves deep chestnut like his fur.
In the spring, tiny white star flowers
and he shone, like them,
in my firmament.
He was mine,
if you can own any creature.
I was his sun, his moon.

Damaged by his rough birth,
head tilted in perpetual enquiry
always a little dizzy and deaf.
He’d watch my hands
as I taught him to do.

He’d push his bowl, one foot inside,
clattering across the floor,
to say he was hungry.
Curious as a child,
accepting of everything.
He gave, but took nothing.
His place always beside me.

Sometimes that space
is more than I can bear.

Moth

One egg amongst so many, silvered,
on the leaf’s underside.
Hatching, soft-bodied on multiple legs
and so very hungry.
Transforming in a husked shell, liquified,
born again.
White delicate wings, antennae
fernlike.
Caught by the light from
the window.

The girl was scared
of the fluttering aimlessness,
the night-time alien otherness
and threw a book.
It twitched where it lay
on the carpet.
She turned off the lamp,
the room was full of moonlight
and the scent of magnolias.

In the morning all that was left
was an imprint of wings in white.
Sometimes the dust regathered into
a ghost moth,
flitting down guilty dreams.

She taught her children to revere the moth,
planted her garden
with evening scented flowers
for those ethereal night-time pollinators.

The Passing of Plants

She’d name each one as we passed;
Vipers Bugloss, Bird’s Foot Trefoil,
Herb Robert, Alexander, Ragged Robin,
Stitchwort, Jack-in-the Hedge,
and so, I learnt.

My favourite time was Spring,
bright green, bluebell splash,
flat heads of cow parsley
gleaming white in dappled light
smelling musty, of spices
kept too long.

Of the plants I learned
many, once familiar are gone
through the flail’s vandalism,
hedgerows cut back too early
and too hard, no time to seed.

She too has gone,
her last years confined to bed,
living in her childhood,
yearning for the lanes, bright by-ways,
the scattering of light through leaves.

The Bucket of Blood
(being a hostelry on the road out of Phillack)

The story tells of the Innkeeper’s daughter pulling a bucketful from the well, getting half a gallon of blood, not the Cornish water he expected. All parts of a smuggler, pulled out at a time from that hole, before the water table could recover. Nothing ever proved, of course. Could have been run-off from a mine, could have been lad larks with a pint of paint. But then, if you listen to the codger in the corner, could also be a dragon’s stash; you can hear her footfall and her baited breath on evenings of sea mist.

Husband and Wife Shop

‘They were spraying the sky again last night’
says the owner of the organic farm shed.
‘You can’t tell me it was ice crystals from wing tips.

‘We check the chicken husbandry. Their welfare
is fine, they walk out, are never in two-tier sheds.
There’s a big one in the freezer’.

‘That book’s from a good guy. Local.
He knows his stuff, has done his research.
Medical Fascism, just £10. You’ve got to know’.

‘Toasted sesame oil, chocolate-coated rice cakes,
We try and keep a good range in. The green labels
show which veg is organic. Eight types of potatoes’.

‘We’ve all been lied to, only a few of us
are wise to their smears. The shed’s lined with foil’.

Guide Book

We make the walk to Men an Tol
as we did when Matt and Tom were small,
could climb through the Polo mint of stone,
rather than crawl through, puddle to puddle.

It’s still there. Very still,
if you exclude the gusts that shiffle
the heather, the cold shower
pattering on our storm coats.

I check the dodgy guidebook
which has led us wrong before,
complain about the stonechat
in the illustration of the Meyn.

‘So where is that?’, I say, and a small bird –
black cap, cherry chest, lands
on a gorse bush, not two metres off,
checks us out, blows away.

That’s one query answered, but doesn’t solve
St Michael’s Mount in the picture background.
All you can see from here is the engine house
of the Greenburrow mine, pinned to the long horizon.

Falmouth Rocks

We went there, a few years ago
around the rocks where nobody else existed
where we could take off our clothes and feel the sun on our bodies.
The past, yes, but I know the heat of the sun.
I know the glorious warmth on my skin
dancing across my breasts
as it danced across your chest, your tummy.
The cormorants stood guard, soldiers protecting their castle.
A kayak glides, lazy rowing strokes
lazy gentle strokes, my hand on yours
blue skies, green eyes.
Here we are now
at the point. The castle. The rocks. The sea.
And we feel the sun on our bodies.

Treleigh Churchyard

The oak coffin cradles the body
and prepares it for planting.

It takes an hour to prepare, fit and set
like a cot for a full-grown man.

The bereaved have placed cards
and photographs with their loved one.

October rain creeps inside my stiff collar
as my polished shoes press into the soil.

Umbilical straps lower the box
and the brass handles disappear from sight.

It is morning all day,
it is cloudy,

we huddle around the earths open wound
and it is cold.

Angelus Domini

You used to pray the rosary
as if placing stones
over a purgatorial river.
Hail Mary, full of grace.

Some where thrown with defiant confidence
while others were placed more precariously,
wobbling in the downward stream.
Blessed art though among women.
Sometimes it felt like your mouth
was full of pebbles, spitting them out
one by one, uneven and mismatched
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

You thumb would trace its way
over the beads, faintly clicking
for each decade until they ran out.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,

and you’d close your eyes
to see the path you’d prayed out
for yourself, pray for us sinners now
and in the hour of our death.