Tag: beach

I lost you on the beach at the end of the world

These are private words
It is not for you to know
But me to say
You turned
Under a ragged sun
Only then I remembered 
How the world ends
Not with a whimper
(As Mr Eliot said)
But a shrivelled leaf
Almost an hour gone
The chink of knives on cups
Sour coffee breath
In that aching clarity
Between wakefulness and sleep
I waited while
You went on ahead
I hate it here you said
But we have nowhere left to go
Except this curl of beach
Tonguing the acid sting
Of salt and vinegar on cracked lips
That common benediction 
I will swim 
Til my ear aches
With the conch deep voice
Of your chasing echo
Ribs a heaving predator
Breathing in
A swelling tide
Breathing out
A stitch in time
Just like Jesus had
No more walking
Face a squall
Towards the sunpath, wounding
The shallow sea now gone
Leaving brine and sulphur
Wary, scuttling things
The day again renews
The shape of your shadow thins
Over loose corrugations 
Slips beneath my feet
When I turn head on
To almost forever
In blinding scintillations

Fat Man At The Beach

Put salt in a jar

That convalescent blue

Shook it until

The sun-flecked afternoon

Groaned seashell promises

Lazily rolling

The lap of drowning dreams

There is always a fat man at the beach

In the background, walking against

The shore like some chagrined duck

Or penguin, skinned raw, useless wings, hands like cranes

Making round desultory pecks

As if

Beyond all proprietal regrets

Still tentatively swimming

Aeroplanes

The beach is made of glass

Walking backwards

On the far side of the rain

Footprints erase themselves

In swiftly drawn tongues lapping 

I am inside my Melchizedek

A message, overlong

Stained with salt, curled within

Break to find the ocean’s scrawl

–Almost indecipherable 

We chastise to the whine   and palsied shake of aeroplanes

Bright and corkscrew shards

Just a casual threat

In the thought of sudden falling

Now a sun-struck chisel mark 

In the poise of distance

Almost gone

From the isthmus of my eye

The wound is sunset
      volcanic glass


           the sea


       between the cradle


      in the lee
              
    a swell
stretched in a glimpsed hiatus


The cigarette burn you left
                 still brightly watching


         from the harbour
of my chest


A ship with nowhere
but this destination 


You said sorry, how you slumped
burnt copper dreaming slept
the way old lighthouses do


The fabric holing
with that mesmer’s grace


Spilling ash and flickered thoughts
the glare clenched in the spasm of your fist
gone wave break lax


Afterwards
     for salve a sting, the glassy shine
        of long past knotted healing


 The grain of sand
    in the isthmus of your eye
  all that remains


Watchful
    in a different glass
(still wide awake)


Of the beach I dreamed