Atlantic
- Debris
Here are random finds in our universe
of rubbish
made valuable by their journey:
Pellets of poison – unmade plastic,
plastic made and broken down,
plastic scattered, returned, remade by nature.
Glossy beans from equatorial forests.
Hard wood mined by white shelled molluscs-
ship worm. And faded flags.
Columbus crab on Goose barnacle,
tube worm building on tube worm on tube worm.
Tags from fisheries in Arctic ice.
Buoys in fish egg clusters
bleached by the sun on one side only.
Bleached bone of whale and cod and human.
On every island, atoll, shore.
The Hermit Crab
I love my shell,
I have grown into it,
But it fits too well
And I must leave.
He has a shell
Which is too big for him.
It would fit me well
So I’ll follow him.
I climb on his shell
And pull him out of it.
He fights back
But I am strong.
I’ve won his shell,
So crawl inside of it,
I forced him out
And it’s mine to keep.
I love my shell,
I have grown into it,
But it fits too well
And I must leave.
Circe.
Don’t you think she’d had enough
of sailors dropping in
to waste her time,
saying they’d stay a few nights
but still there
months later, trampling
her Aeaea, her island home?
How old do you think she was?
Goddess. What had she seen
in her long life?
Year after year, men
abusing her and her women.
Screams in the night,
piss on the patio, vomit in the pool.
When she found someone messing with her loom
she snapped. The first time.
Potion in his bowl of morning milk
then ‘pooff’ he was a lion.
He had more dignity.
Her sister’s son, the Minotaur,
he WAS a fright!
What animals would other men make?
So many became pigs.
Tame in animal form,
accepting of their fate, happier.
Perhaps a side effect?
When Odysseus arrived
to save his crew of pork,
show her what a human man could be,
she thought,
‘he’s like a god’,
then found he used a potion
for protection
and that impressed her too.
They were almost equal.
So, for him, she released the pigs,
and put up with feasting
every night,
FOR A YEAR!
Odysseus said she’d made the men more handsome,
and taller.
That was a myth.
She was able to say, ‘sorry no vacancies’,
to passing ships
and family stayed away,
except Helios and Perse (an Oceanid),
her parents, obviously.
And it was good to have Odysseus
in her bed.
Did they learn to trust each other?
This was what she wanted
more than anything
it seems.
Odysseus?
Who loved Penelope
in Ithaca?
Circe was goddess, he was enchanted,
she let that lie for now.
That was his excuse.
And when the men decided they should leave
she thought, ‘thank you gods! ’
and helped them
to get home, to have some peace.
Not Write Like Sylvia
I don’t know if I can write,
not write
like Sylvia, like acid engraving.
She who was mad
so wrote like hacking
at her leg
or thumb.
Cut back, fully held in torment,
don’t turn away,
lost centre so splintered,
pulling a needle in,
sewing her head back on
to her knee,
backwards,
with words.
She wrote lost but she’s here.
I write here,
lost.
New Zealand.
Jim said, ‘drive Mum?’ so we changed seats
in the forest of tallest evergreens I’d seen
on South Island, or anywhere.
The automatic drove itself.
We passed roots in water.
Another bridge, another bridge, another bridge,
each numbered and named, description of the place
or the man who named it.
Following the smooth stoned river bed,
a line of turbulence through trees, twisting
in greying light, snaking away down,
as we went up.
We stopped in the bottom of a bowl,
The forest rose around us to last light,
trees gathered to make a being,
the god of green.
Waves of branches stirred the wind,
Birds and the cicada, whistled, crackled
murmured, filled up
the air between.
We ate as Sand-flies ate us,
slapped them off each other’s faces,
laughing in a roaring
sea of trees.
And as dark monochromed, the movement ceased,
we listened to the Tui calling
‘too we two’
Then silence.
In this Southern Hemisphere,
mirror of our own, but still owned by trees,
the forest
made us part of it.
Mother and son travelling to find a new,
had we turned back and found the old?
This was wilderness.
It felt like home.
.
Flood Tide On the North Coast of Cornwall by Jane Darke
For a few days twice a month
the moon pulls back the sea
revealing everything
and leaves it there exposed, reluctantly.
Fish and lobsters are caught by this first tide
but by the second, which goes further back,
they have retreated if they can
to deep pools
and to the deeper sea itself.
Then this land craves the sea.
Time is
suspended,
not
breathing, waiting.
Anemones resolve to glossy mounds
and kelp stalks stand two feet above the water
now with fronds hung limp.
Worms in their casts in grey silty sand
move as the slope dries
and water trickles down, everywhere and out,
to the Equator.
Limpets rasp on rock
and crabs tick away the seconds
listening for movement.
This is
the
lowest point
of tide.
Small cuttlefish, mating,
change colour as they drift.
Dark sea slugs sometimes in hundreds,
graze clear green sea lettuce.
Iridescent turquoise weed
lies over purple-red palmaria palmata.
Pipe fish, straightened sea horse,
slide through bootlace weed
almost unnoticed as eight lobsters,
one centimetre each, sit together in July.
Land
animals
arrive on
the sea bed.
Black neoprened bodies
with crushing feet queue to jump in pools,
turn stones and leave them turned,
take tiny crabs cooked at the caravan,
spear anything that moves
but somehow not each other,
converge with kayaks, lately paddle boards
and four metre grey and orange dirigibles-
unloading everything they own
for they have bought the wild.
This temple
becomes
play
ground.
And at the biggest out
when the sea pulls back further,
then further back and in six hours floods
to the highest line of strand
(a seven metre rise of ocean in six hours)
this flood tide fills the world.
At this turning the weight of ocean is measured
then trickles over drying sand
in eager reclamation
taking no time to soak in.
Waves break,
small pools
combine.Weed
picks up.
The force of water swirls everything
together and apart and land animals must leave
as prawns drift in,
then sand eels and smelt shoals,
to see what died under the sun,
then big fish to eat them.
And all roads lead home
as mackerel breeze the surface
in great shoals, crush into rocks,
then head south fat for winter.
Emptiness
is filled.
All is
safe again.
Nairobi- Rift Valley- Masai Mara
Leaving Nairobi in a fast truck,
red earth after rain,
we banged down hard
over ruts and barrelled
on toward The Rift
climbing through viridian
and shanty sprawl.
Long lines of tin shack,
wooden one room shop fronts:
Tasty Treats Hotel,
Okonkwo Lubricant Oils,
Ntu Lele High- Vet- Agrochemicals,
roasting corn and Coca cola,
on the road.
At the edge we stopped,
amid tourist tat, to look.
Stretching below the hazy plain,
The Rift Valley,
ancient caldera either side.
A vast expanse swept down
where we would go.
Container trucks screamed
past as motor bikes
with three people
wove between. Then
green turned pale
and on the valley floor dust parted
revealing goats and cattle.
Zebra and gazelle stood
in scrub as we drove faster,
rain falling hard.
Wildebeest
kicked across the track.
And last of all the tall men
turned and smiled.
Night fell like a blind.
Deep trench either side,
we slewed in mud,
a truck alone in wilderness,
when something in the axel broke
and we were quiet,
even the driver. This was Africa.
Self-sown
Each time I come I clear her garden,
a small yard with white walls.
Is it ten years?
I prune the pale pink rose
against the wall, now cracked
and dropping render.
Moss fills the non-slip grooves
in broken paving.
Worms slowly empty flower pots
through the hole,
weeds of bitter cress sit low inside.
I feed plants that survive
with pellets from the drum,
snip dead stalks off the lavender.
Self-sown fox gloves I move to fill the gaps
and bamboo to hide the window light
at night. The stones wander.
She liked the wood sorrel,
a plant she showed me when I was a child.
‘It just appeared’, she said.
Wood sorrel which drops its head,
asks so little,
lives bright and still in moss
on threads of stem,
returning every year
almost unnoticed.
Settled
New Zealand
New England
New South Wales
New York
New Brunswick
New Jersey
Nova Scotia
Newfoundland
New Guinea
British Colombia