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This is where you get on. Step over the breakers and you’re on your way.
How far? Last week’s couple did it in a morning before they disappeared.
When I say “disappeared” don’t get me wrong. We lost sight, that’s all.
I expect they made it as they didn’t come back and no flares were seen.
No, we don’t use ropes. It’s too much to carry and they tangle in the tides.
You’ve got plenty of water there’s food in the packs and, of course, the flares.
Would you do me a favour? If, when you get there send us a signal. A sign.
Something to let us know. Thanks. Right then, off you go keep straight and you’ll be fine.
That’s it. Follow the track. Can you make it out? Aim for the centre of the light.
Safe Harbour
1
She learned it early, that smile, used the world over to placate and to persuade.
She exercised it each morning, quietened her children, schooled her husband to good behaviour,
sent it before her each evening into a room of laughing men, taught it to earn tips at the bar,
let it spread from her mouth to raised cheeks and tightened jaw, coloured her talk with whites and reds,
employed it carelessly, allowed it to play with a strand of hair, look twice at the stranger at the corner table,
until insatiable nights wiped it from her perfected face and stole it from her eyes
2
So tonight all the light is robbed from her eyes
and the smile once found with ease when lighting our candle
takes ten seconds to compose as she walks to our table from the back room.
Her long peppered summer has fetched up in August weary as winter,
and now she must keep on walking through an unbreakable dream that brings no escaping
3
Like the dream you’ve forgotten by morning but doesn’t forget you, your son dead, your father dying again, the nightmare that lies heavy behind eyes that cloud for hours despite sunshine, lamplight or even awakened love, so the voice on the phone that evening cannot be believed, the postcard from the island beach in Thailand, date smudged, must have been censored, the e-mail confirming her arrival forged, and the only thing that can burn off the doubt is another half-remembered dream, unwilled, involuntary, but this time light
4
As the weightless catamaran that straddles the countless fires extinguishing and lighting the warm sea
on a risen morning resolved to dazzle eyes and burn off all effects of clouds
while the brief wakes of yachts break cover to take their chance and slake untethered restlessness
unsheeted at the exhausted wind muffled engines screwing to the sun as crews float between lives
5
Like us upon the salt of life, swimming on the writhing sea bathing in the showered sun hugging shade beneath the pines,
purged of form, reduced to line so recognition sheds disguise, and sparrows peck at sparrow dunes and sand flies fly across the sand,
and we follow the directions concealed from the border guards who only mistake them for maps painted on glass quicksilvered by death,
and here we’ll find our way while pedalos pedal families of five lilos lie low in the afternoon and the day glows in dayglows,
navigate a route through clouds and imagine ourselves to light until we settle to the smiles that trade in nothing but themselves.
Another Life [Acropolis, Mycenae, Greece]
You were here, she says, in another life: worshipped perpendicular ghosts, declaimed blood to an amphitheatre of poppies.
Perhaps. I stand watch in April sunlight, examine the mountains for signs of life, small prey, friend or foe stepping stones:
settle to this body, my face beaten in gold, my father on an upright slab. I take a breath and stretch, enter the beehive tomb:
the floor sinks and springs on the vast hidden skin that tenses under Mycenae. My spirit sags, then rises, then somersaults into another life.
Nothing in sight can help despite the miles of white wheat that reach to the grey meeting point of endless earth and sky that
nothing interrupts, no hand-hold, hand outstretched, arm offered to lift her from him less than a body length away,
feet planted hard apart on the furrowed soil, rifle parallel to the sharpened horizon as she turns her back, cradles
her daughter’s back, doubles up in thin protection, unable to hide in the great emptiness that exposes them, bent
under the cupola of sky, dwarfed by its cold metallic cathedral of nothingness, no candle in the eastern wind that chills
them both and him and the invisible photographer, bent on one knee, one eye shut, the other lensed objective as his finger finds the button.
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