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he hopes he’ll laugh with his mates about the voice of the tommy-bouncer asking for food in the dripping shaft,
and how he thought he’d heard the sea washing towards him in the wheal, yet followed his spirit anyway,
hoping it would lead him to a seam of casserterite that would change everything. He’ll laugh about the sandwich he left
on the ledge, the lunch he’d needed when he hit the lode and didn’t want to leave. His grandfathers too had wanted more bread
as they ate in darkness, saving on candlewax. But the tommy-bouncers took that extra crust, their scrabbling hands
twitched it from the kibble, before the men had set their dets. In return, the whistling spirits buoyed them, their whispers singing,
‘Mine yourself like a lode, trim your wick, and, we, the tommy-bouncers, will sit with you, and save you from a land-slip.’
Back at the dry, he showers off the ore with Fairy soap, jokes, just as he’d hoped, about his number nearly being up, then
pushes open those double doors on to the Atlantic, where the red stream washes round the cliffs to the town.
He hears again watery songs, scufflings, breaths that blew him up the shaft until he rose like a gull on air.
In the waiting room we’d stared for hours at the umbrella pine in a painting someone had put there to help us wait. The sky leaked over the moor, the moor leaked its heather over the frame, the purple light leaked into the wall from the open field while your ballooning arm leaked into the chair.
The consultant’s voice was clean and quick. ‘May I take your photograph?’ His students, busy cartographers, gathered up their implements, torches, lenses, clipboards, words like ‘block of disease’. And there was your chest, pale as a birch and as thin, the blue islands, blue as pines, like a map some pressure of geography had caused. ‘Of course,’ you said, glad to be useful again.
‘Come here and look at this perfect example of a paralysed larynx.’
Yet you could still speak and to me your voice sounded no different, textured, lyrical like a rough piece of wood you’d handle and plane or turn into shape, forests in that voice, beech and larch and teak, a good bit of oak, some pine grained as streaming water, as wood shavings scattered on a sawdust floor.
Months later, driving through woods there’s a patch of larches, made papery and apricot by light, their evergreen shapes at odds with their orange needled leaves, and something of you has leaked into them, something you would have said about larchwood, some lost knowledge, some connection only I can make now with the saw’s rasp or planks lined up how you wanted them or with a student in the hospital, holding the photograph and peering like a craftsman at the blue islands of your chest. In the ark of suffering maybe you are there with him, handing him the tools, advising, that long muscle of your voice, unbotched and clear.
For years you quell water-weeds, struggle with the sun, strive for clouds in your water-trap,
letting the fall of water, the floating Os catch light and wind between their gaps. But the watched for clouds seep in,
fogging agapanthus, irises. You walk the garden in a mist, guessing that woman is Blanche,
guessing she’s picking caterpillars from nasturtiums, though you know they’ll be stripped,
the orange faces shredded. The wisteria’s a crude tangle of ropes. The lilies are smeared white-gold.
You shout, ‘I call this yellow. What do you call it?’ Amnesia of colour.
You’re forced to squint, reading sienna (intermittent bleeding) red ,
cobalt (drowning) blue , painting by word in a torture of monochrome.
And after the knife, the waiting, head sandbagged,
no sudden moves, month after month of black flecks in your sights, until
the new glasses from Germany, and the bridge suddenly burning trees and earth together,
a hell on water, raging in ochre, in orange, demanding you.
Sitting down in mud, we pack it tight on skin, delicately finger it under eyes, massage it into breasts and inside thighs, shape each other’s backs, as if sculpting mud onto a frame. Now we are wild women, wild men, the first people of the early world, made from earth and water to stare at the sky, our feet growing from the ground.
When we stand, the gaps we leave fill like quick-sand as if we’ve taken nothing from the earth.
Our eyes peer through holes in mud-masks, as we lean in the sun, statues drying, the thick wet glaze turning to plaster. Then we come alive, and cracking, as we move, slide into sulphurous water, let our feet drift, see our moulds loosen, lift, dissolve, grey clouds swirling in the hot spring.
We dry out on beach mats, watch alligators, in the farm next door, open jaws, slowly snap, sink into mud, only their eyes visible through the barrier, watching us, now we are flesh again.
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