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Yesterday we’d weathered A fierce night, dodging floods, escaping flaying branches.
Exeter under water, Bristol threatened, but we came through safe enough. Slept between thunder and dawn.
This morning the sea’s boiling. Spindrift like baited lace splashes the highest rock.
The bar, a tremendous wall drawn up through vertical ribs of water, breaks in uproar.
“Worst I’ve seen.” you said. “You know, of course, it’s Tennyson’s bar.”
(But that was death).
The storm continued between moments of cold silence. The light ravishing.
They built no foundations for this house. Let the weight of stone drive through the earth till now it stands two feet deeper than its neighbours.
A secret place. No noise enters or escapes. The entry’s narrow, dark and north facing.
But today the sun juggles its way round the rooms resting a while on the ladder-backed chairs. I’ll make my mark here.
Fill these spaces with a variety of things I think beautiful. Like flowers say or this cold, stone bowl, satin to my skin.
The flags on the floor no longer sweat, an extension has been added and I’ve made a garden between cobbled paths.
But in the end I know, I’ll just be an entry in a hundred year old register
like the Crowdy boys who slept in the loft room head to toe, head to toe, head to toe.
Tonight I’ll sleep upside down, face the moon. Even after all time and men clambering about in its dust it goes through clouds amazing.
I have studied those charts, my fingers drawing across lines and dates, where the moon is the head of a pin and earth the ‘o’ of a bobbin reel.
Sun mirror, wave sucker, flung cast of lunacy. Once it caught light in its lemon shift, ate Kentucky grass, spat a blue luminous as Sheba.
But you’d walk rough shod a thousand, thousand Roman miles and still there’d be no reaching the moon of myths where all lost things are
love, quarrels and sons, the diamond scratch of old wrongs.
A papyrus containing six-hundred lines of verse was found resting on the breast of a mummy in Alexandrian Egypt. It was written over 2,000 years ago and the poet was Posidippus of Pella. It is believed to be the oldest known collection of Greek poetry.
He wrote of grief and cures, shipwrecks and love and some lines about a stone he thought distinctly odd.
All these he left with his beloved. I too have written of snow and aubergines, told of birth, mentioned passion in passing.
One day we’ll meet, Posidippus, I’ll listen to you in some ethereal olive grove. Lyres will play, strange creatures pass.
Later, in an English wood, we’ll sit sipping tea and I will tell you tales of jazz and wars and all our words will be most beautiful and exact.
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