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November
2011:
Launch of posthumous poetry collection Daphne Rock 1927 - 2008
They say: a tenth of all bodies contains that pristine hydrogen, a gas passed down five thousand million years… …light and inflammable, and nothing to show until it burns to water…
…you look normal enough, not even a gleam or spark winking and dancing as when it burst from the Big Bang to spin and recompose, then pass through unguessed ancestors: who would you choose to share your beginnings, world’s eternity? and who will host those secrets once meant to die with you?
Out of your hands in any case and there — it flies off, possibly touched with faint tincture of newness, a mote to settle on the eyelashes of the child following, inheriting matter which was never young.
Wild garlic, you can scarcely pick feet through this star-white frothing and it is as before. The track is as before, the sea crushed into breakers mounting high, only she is not as before. Always a hard descent, funnelling through limestone blocks, rocking stones, sudden drops – now pebbles stretch almost to the sea’s mouth, old legs are driven on like the blown foam, speckled on sleeves, on rock pools, cloaking perilous deeps; she is wound with wraiths and shadows drifting and teasing, as if they could drag her back, shadow ropes to bind her with thin half words, reminder of the glorious leaping from stone to stone, catapult across canyons, chiding and teasing while she ages, the voices fall.
Old knees crack, a lunge for handholds, fingers slide over the sharp rock, and poles spin, giddying the day; fingers flailing for grip, a voice in the stomach stifled at the mouth, stiffens the spine, go back, beyond the sea-litter, the spent foam, springs trickling, the wet conglomerate, the ill-placed boulders, god knows these were not the legs she began with on those bright mornings. Out there breakers advance and if she falls now, if she falls they will certainly treat her like bladder wrack, like a torn limpet, to be washed up in pieces like the crab, which she deserves, old fool, still tottering on stone glass-smooth, harried round in the swell.
She grasps that common sense she once clothed herself in, up and down the beach watchful for each beloved, counting, counting, vigilance forced on like a cold skin.
She’s there. Sands to centre her. Seas making in over the flat shore, tides without mind, her goal eaten up by water. Around her ghost voices, drift of children’s laughter, her pockets full of apples… But then the retreat, grudgingly, waves filled with witches from the deep, calling return, return. Hands strung with sugar kelp tangle her feet.
Time to save herself she hauls her body upward. Knuckles bleed red into sandstone. This place is not a grave, not yet. She can always come back.
It was a pattern written on dirt under roads, the way to water. She was a duchess, disdaining cars, neither to right nor left she looked leading her ducklings. Neither to right nor left: she stepped down the kerb. They followed. This was an ancient way, a map in their down heads. Trucks swerved, brakes bit as she crossed the A44: trumpets might have sounded, cloaks been flung in the mire. The Red Sea rolled and retreated: she passed, neck stiff, not knowing how singly miracles come.
Her high visibility vest billows yellow wings as she planes and tilts high on the silver sand. She is joy taking off with her red hard hat askew, her pony tail flying;
Wellington boots clammed with the Gault clay she slips, riding the sand slope arms wide with delight, covering sixty-five million years in seconds, head over heels laughing and gathering nodules which spark against the white light.
Her pockets are heavy with fossil woods annual rings diamante with bracelets of fool's gold.
Joyous, she is printed on every plane of the vast pit like the sun which once coaxed life from the world, nurtured small puffs of oxygen to grow lungs and fingers and wings.
Today she is the sun.
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