Norwich, 2002
Gulls
We are too far inland for gulls
though it seems I hear them
wheeling in the spaces
where towers used to stand.
If I walked to the sea now
what would I find?
Salt-crystals, pearls, the shells
to fit my words into
the pairless cockle-words.
Would the scurf clear
make enough of a mirror on the sand
for you to see my face
at the shores edge, where the land-lines blur?
I could be beautiful here
we could make our strange gull-cries together
I would build no empty towers
you would keep me from such stairs.
Snow scene with black-headed gulls at the foot of Atago hill district, Hiroshige ga
The Italian Chapel (built by Prisoners of War on Orkney)
Plaster, and beneath it
the corrugated iron you say they built their shelters from
here, on the island where the sea shifted olive green
around rocks an eternity away
from the sunwarmed terracotta of home.
Plaster, painted white against the winters bile and fret
and on the inside painted too
painted like heaven, you say, your eyes
looking over my shoulder, hands drawing
blueprints on the tabletop.
The mouths of the saints, drawn by a homesick man
whispered of another kind of shelter - in the curve of an arm
was the angle a girl made, leaning from a doorway
her face tipped up by a departing hand -
now they are all dust, that these Orkney winds scour off.
Even the most lapsed men must have become devout, here
where the maps of their Emperor-fathers grew blurred
or followed no survey but the veining of the parchment, the twist
of an inkspill across the page. Out here
there was a need for another kind of shelter.
It must have captured the imagination of the guards
or perhaps a newspaperman, over from the mainland
his city coats blown out into gullwings behind him
searching for something other than carrion to pick over
with his neat hands, for the prisoners must have been permitted
their construction, a permission that in turn allowed
the sentry, bowed by days under the glaring sky
to meet his own eyes in the mirror, having gazed once
upon the face of their contraband madonna
still in the heat from her unset fresco healing.
I see you, ducking under the mantel, past
the faithful mockery of tower, column, portico
into the curved gloom, bottletop glass in the windows.
I want to ask you where you think they got the paint from
but cannot, cannot shatter this domed and fragile calm
any more than I could ever lay my hands
beside absences so old they cant be named, against the plaster flank
of this glorified shed that was once so full of glory
gaze into the dulled brown eyes of the saints
finally cooled into immobility by the wind outside.
I can only lay my hands here, on yours
on a tabletop varnished in longspilt beer
only to forget all this for a moment, before
I will have to say something to bring you back
from dreams, to another kind of shelter, here.
Orkney Stone, Richard Long
Night-tide
I swam the night-tide, thinking I would drown
my hair a heavy net, a phosphorescent crown
I sank to where the stars dim light was dulled
to where the currents meshed, and I unfurled
my hands, and caught between their webs
the tiny stars that glistened there. I wept
for the light I had forsaken, and shed my breath
in silver baubles, strung up from the depth
I floated, still, suspended for a time
and as I could not sink, so I began to climb
wrenched myself back, with bleeding lungs and eyes
to where the stars still danced, and filled the air with cry
for I lived yet, and could not bear to drown
my hair a golden net, a phosphorescent crown.
In the Waves, Paul Gauguin, 1889
Before Shorelines, there was Hair, and two more evocative poems of Sally Roe: Shaving her hair and Growing my hair
