Perched upon the edge of the world
she sits, writing poetry, safe inside
the boundaries of the old gray cottage
formed and moulded from Cornish stone
where heartened and stirred
she stares out to sea, contemplating
its vast emptiness -
a quiet corner of the ocean
where people are few enough.
With hints of an irreverence
bordering on blasphemy, she wonders
if it is enough to simply speak
of beautiful things
without necessarily
putting a beautiful finish on them -
cartographers' mistakes
precisely placed, clustered cowherd shippons,a sodden Norman church -
a place to halt for salt.
The letter came at noon;
she takes it straight up to the walls to read –
those ancient drystone walls
where she’s walked a thousand times before, unnoticing
no time to change, just to tie back her hair,
the wind in the east – a brewing storm.
She stops to read; time pauses and watches intently
but the camera obscura in the medieval church tower
points away, so intent
on the humdrum present unfolding
changing history -
of plesiosaur and the swan's death song
rain in the woods, the mournful cry of the coot;
in them are the fleeing hoof, recollections of the injured horse,
memories of slow, snowy deaths and swift hieroglyphs –willowy scratchings of toes in sedimented sand
skeletal mussel shells, the spirals that ringthe secrets of the old voices
and the games of the moon.
Now, all she has are his words -
heaving clouds
with only the splash of her dress giving colour
to the darkling day -
broken shells, a coil of hope –
a hundred vipers’ worth of green hemp
tarred, silken, brown-foamed
and heavy as her heart
with no-one to help her drag it home…
The Full Story
©crisstiena
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