John Wedgwood Clarke

Harbour

Sandside

1

Don't go: light rises up before the gull,
the fishing's good. Lower the orange line
and listen to the shallows as a crab
plays arpeggios on the mud piano,
his touch like someone picking stitches,
a stinging echo. It's hopeless here:
the tide falls, absence stinks; no forgetting
you're coming and going. If a brick falls
it stays fallen, sparrows flit through
lobster pots and all boats shatter the sky.
A boy mimics the gulls, head flung back
gagging on air, regurgitating life
in a sound like raw sea light, its stone buds
opening, a sign of nothing but flight.

2

Once a trawl begins, the water pressure
drags apart the mouth-boards of the net
as it rumbles up a dust storm, the sea
woken mid-dream, familiar words gone strange

in its mouth, uttered and sound-bitten,
their habitats erased, or clenched back in
turbid ruins. Beside the tank of diesel,
the ice house and heaps of chain, the racked boards

are war-shields in an armoury, a row
of rusty tongues for hire, each saying nothing
they've seen, a blind metaphor abandoned
on a desolate highway, gathering sand.

Lighthouse

1

By the lighthouse, a mighty thrush
has been hard at it since dawn:
many bronze snail shells litter the pier,
pierced and glazed over, the damage
crisscrossed by brass threads,
watch-dial windows. Diving suits, crucified
upside down against the white wall,
leak bodies, hair dragged and shoved back
under, monstrous scabs of pearl.
A wooden box like a what-the-
butler-saw, with two handle-wheels to strip
a man to breath, bellows down the air
into a globe-like shell, where someone
fumbles, his hands like two disasters.

2

The lighthouses have lost their way:
after the bombardment, only the memory
of light, the replica lantern room
like an old-fashioned bird-cage
at an auction house, the bird long gone
singing its horizon on forgotten frequencies.

Outer Harbour

Low tide in the outer harbour and a distant transmission
from the North Sea rolls in across the shining mud
like the raised veins on the back of a mother's hand,

transparent veins from a cloudy body always
there and unmemorable, a gaze gone quiet and present,
in which it marks its first return, its tiredness

dilating into life, its message breaking without air,
no bright reflection but refraction, a magnification of mud
that travels between the gravestones of bare keels.

We have prepared for her return, like children offering up
our secret weight: a net, a flag, some fuel, life-buoys –
all going nowhere, waiting for her touch to lighten us.

Tide Heights

Salmon Steps, Long Greece Steps, the steps
down a mine, down the side of a wreck,
down a ship, down your first house,
your last, down the side of a pier,
here, where a nail's been abandoned
by the wood around it, its stubborn song
banging on out of childhood. First nail
of summer, O thumb and the hammer,
the return of the banging, the precision of rage,
the thumb and the hammer, the belt
and the why's and the wherefore's of song,
this measurable portion, the rule
on the rough stones for depth of the water,
for the moon made numbers, for low tide haunting,
high tide clarities, and whatever the tide,
fathoming clearance, its numerals
enveloped, revealed, chiselled or painted,
as toothed rack drifts past like an astronaut
cut from his craft, heading for deep space.

Castle Headland

Down below, a pocket garden
of neon seed heads,
above, a levitating meadow
steps off into air –

up here, all scale is reversed:
a haphazard samba
of crickets measure their song
around me, out-trilling

Thriller. Flakes of snail trail
persist on stone chips
like the remnants of a language
spoken by the night –

the ants are wild in the heat
dismantling it in the
absence of anything else
to carry off, just the odd noun

left shining its journey
in a hidden mouth. The bay is filled
with small boats caught
in wet paint, the stones afloat.

A host of black gnats jostle
with tiny hymn books over a path
that rises to the walls,
the patched and broken walls

coming and going, as they do.
How little I know of
the clouds that have come
to gaze at the edge of the land.