Flight Path

His first time in the glider

                                           tiny flecked rocks 
                                           an enormous dark blue dark outpouring of sea.

This was real emotion
rolled up in a bolt of white air
thermal, engulfed by a staggering singular force.

It bears him in a muscular, thundering embrace,
compresses his breath,
this was sex , fury, joy.

A drop of pressure and up swung a vertebra of cliff,
snatches of field through a torn cloud,
water, land, sky, sloped.

That gull disturbed from its nest

                                                                      imagine!
                                                                      The world tipped upside down.

His hand on the lever, that freedom to fall,
to return again over Cornwall
earth and heaven.

Peter Lanyon was born in St Ives in 1918. He was a full-time artist and part time glider. This poem is inspired by one of his gliding paintings. ‘Thermal’.

Waiting

I am half a mile out to sea, waiting.
The sea is shallow flat, less than a foot deep,
the red sun casually lowering.

A set arrives over the reef, breaking,
her salty lips fold over like a sheet.
The head-high barrel wave is waiting

for me to air-drop into standing.
I see rainbow seaweed underneath,
through the tunnel, the is sun lowering.

I feel the compression of the wave collapsing,
through the almond-shaped space my eye meets
a blue fin tuna skipping, as if waiting

for me. Like a bullet I am catapulting,
behind me salt crystallising to gunpowder sleet
out of the barrel, like shrapnel spray following, lowering

the wave fires me out, and I am surfing.

My hair and I

From Irish roots and freckled pale
cheeks with uniform plaits and pink
blousy bows and over-rigorous one
hundred brushes and winks at prayer
time in named navy blue knickers
incase I should get lost and stolen
kisses down Frog Lane with Garry
Webb and endless sleepy summers sat
on warm pavements the cuckoo long
gone and stand up washes in the
kitchen sink before tea and school
sports days spent at home baking
whilst mum is out cleaning toilets and
dad is in bed to scratchy striped
cheese cloth and flares and loose and
long and flowing wild at heart cautious
by nature splendidly singular walks in
chalk valleys with Keats to guide me in
love to Leonard Cohen soundtrack in
Jonny’s oversized shirt wet from the
musky damp earthen floor of the bothy
to jaunty bob and Mothercare and
buckets of soiled towelling nappies left
to soak overnight to radioactive fallout
and regeneration and acceptance of
loss and childless rounded belly and
wispy violet tints and tender bare spots

Quagmire

This path has become a quagmire.
It’s like trudging through trenches.
Either side, brown bracken lies
dying or dead like rotting bodies.

I pass through fields
where bales have been bound.
The farmer gathered the hay
tied them and left them to rot
when the rains came.

There must hundreds
grouped in pairs in field after field.
I continue on past each sorrowful
couple following the mire.
A warning I do not heed.

I pause on a bridge listening
to the sound of the stream
as the water, pure and free,
cascades down the rocks
from the source high in the hills
into the sea where it will be lost
like me and my thoughts
diluted in the salty waves and swirl.

The Lesson

He pulled the legs off the robot
then asked me to fix it, upset
that it could no longer dance.

The legs dangled from wires
swinging back and forth
as he held it in his arms.

It beeped and played music
turning its head as he pressed
the buttons on the controller.

Its eyes flashed full of life
but it wouldn’t dance and he
liked it when it danced as he

joined in bending at the knees
swaying his hips in time flailing
his arms like squatting moths.

I’ll try super glue but I don’t know
if I can fix it. It’ll be a lesson learned
like when I spent hours building

a model aeroplane and pinned it
to the ceiling only for it to fall
and shatter into pieces and it was

my mother who swept them up,
put them in the bin then wrapped
her arms around me as I wept.

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.

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.