PerPoBlo

Throw me off the gunnels
like the chum they throw to sharks,
chop me up and let me dissolve
in the salty cold of the tidal water
off Calamansak — there, in the green skeins
of Cornish light, in the deep ribs
of the muddy ria, in the long silence
of baited hope: yes, there.

I want to be a future archaeology
for learned salvagers: let me be a layer
among Phoenicians, a peer of Victorians
and Romans; let me sleep nose-to-nose
with that ten-pound bass
that escaped me every summer;
let me make a final joy-drunk dive
into the bosom of the mud.

And in later years as you sail past,
toward the fishing grounds off Shipper’s
or the Frenchman’s, as the limpid silence
of the summer gathers,
Say to your kids, “There, that’s where
we chucked him, that’s where he sleeps.”

Sometimes I am
lousy with thoughts
and each one I catch
I crush and offer up
on the pad of my forefinger.
In the shards
of distorted keratin
the meat oozes
like a pustulate.

Sometimes one escapes,
flipping elegantly
onto the grey plastic
carpet. In the bubbling
fibre they are camouflaged,
but I hunt them with my toe.
There is a siege
of wafer-thin corpses
around my chair.

Some I keep: I jar
them up. I watch
while they expire:
in airless wonder.

Then there are others:
monsters, big enough to
have mandibles.
These claw and bite
and leave bloody volcanoes.
These ones, they do other
things: they procreate,
they multiply, they seed
themselves under my lids,
in the dark, at night.

you were wearing a lyrical satin blue,
confusing sky and dress and purpose
with my silent elation as I followed
twenty steps behind. Behind. Your
arse, as two halves of a split pear,
tumbled on, a jitter of sweet flesh.
As you paused to check your tail
I paused checking too.

Your face collapsed into the tear-tracks
worn by his long death. And while no
tears came, your cheek-flesh wept by habit,
a flushed rampart against which the hurt
you cause recoils and multiplies. What he
might have said were he not dead is beyond
me, but know this: I remember the kindness
in him as his shaking hand shook mine; I
remember the things I could not say as we
stared at one another across his wasting;
and I cannot help you Godmother if you
use this loss as ambush for cruelty.

To write simply –
but these words are a slack
echo of the craft which
slipped anchor years ago.