Nobody

When trees take over an island and say so all at once

  some in pigeon some in pollen with a coniferous hiss

  and run to the shore shouting for more light

  and the sun drops its soft coverlet over their heads

  and owls and hawks and long-beaked sea-crows

  flash to and fro

  like spirits of sight whose work is on the water

  where the massless mind undulates the intervening air

  shading it blue and thinking

  I wish I was there

  or there

  A goddess or fog-shape in full wedding dress

  sulks in that loneliness what a winter creature

  whose lover loathes the everlasting clouds of her

  and sits in tears staring at the pleasure-crinkled sea

  but she as if a dash of hope

  discoloured her sight stands waiting

  the way a spider when it wishes to travel

  simply lets out a silken

  aerial

  electrostatically alert through every hair

  to the least shift of the ionosphere

  at last it lifts on tiptoe and lovely to behold

  like a bare twig it begins to blow

  wherever the wind will take it but the wind

  is the most distracted messenger I know

  Whereupon the water turned in its cloak

  and shook itself into flames and burnt itself into fur

  and tore itself into flesh and told everything

  and instantly shrank into polythene

  and withered and bloomed and resolved to be less faltering

  and failed

  and became a jellyfish a mere weakness of water

  a morsel of ice a glamour of oil

  and became a fish-smell and then a rotting seal

  and then an old mottled man full of mood-swings

  forgetting his name and twisting his hands

  denying and distorting and thinking ill of everything

  he snapped himself into sticks and burst into leaves

  which fell back down again as water

  blue-green and black-shine with white lining

  and blinked himself into thousands of self-seeing eyes

  like a piece of writhing paper in five seconds of fire

  destroying its light with its

  light

  And so the sun brought measurement to everything

  all but the sea frightened of its own stupidity

  and on every cliffside luminous lilies

  made their escape through stones

  whose swinging stems

  were merely the lowest ruffling hems of the passing of spring

  and above them flying in verse

  in time with

  the wind

  Two sisters in shock

  one couldn’t speak one couldn’t stop

  she knocked on the bedroom window

  sister

  hello

  what with tutting and whistling

  she shoved her way in through the door

  well sister if they cut out your tongue

  you’ll have to thread this needle and stitch me the facts

  and as she stitched and stitched those sordid facts

  broke through her feathered smile and became a beak

  As when the moon shines through tent walls

  making black-and-white films of the woods

  so that the sleepers seem to float through trees

  so those two sisters

  out through their back-lit flesh they fly

  into the blue of amnesia

  snapping at insects and can’t think why

  Terrified of insects of noon of sunlight

  when the sea dilates to let more green in

  and the damaged undermost in all its clefts can be seen

  when swallows free themselves of their sorrows

  and seagulls hang themselves on invisible armatures

  and only a few tiny almost magical flashes of light

  fall in the form of rain and

  stop

  those lovers lurk in their indoors wondering

  can he hear us now that poet has he finished

  his poem about us what kind of a sting in the ending

  will he sing of the husband if he is in fact

  on his way here knowing by now the craggy out-jut

  of that shallow place where the seals bob about like footballs

  and did you hear along the shore that chorus of trees

  with seaweed hung from their twigs like wept-in tissue

  being moved by what a heartfelt sigh the wind is

  and have you noticed the way the radius of water

  maintains itself in proportion to its circles

  as if each raindrip made a momentary calculation

  and when it stops there are ruled flat lines

  running from one island metrically to another

  How does it start the sea has endless beginnings

  There is a harbour where an old sea-god sometimes surfaces

  two cliffs keep out the wind you need no anchor

  the water in fascinated horror holds your boat

  at the far end a thin-leaved olive casts a kind of evening over a cave

  which is water’s house where it leads its double life

  there are four stone bowls and four stone jars

  and the bees of their own accord leave honey there

  salt-shapes hang from the roof like giant looms

  where the tide weaves leathery sea-nets

  be amazed by that colour it is the mind’s inmost madness

  but the sea itself has no character just this horrible thirst

  goes on creeping over the stones and shrinking away

  The sea she said and who could ever drain it dry

  has so much purple in its caves the wind at dusk

  incriminates the waves

  and certain fish conceal it in their shells

  at ear-pressure depth

  where the shimmer of headache dwells

  and the brain goes

  dark

  purple

  who could offend the sea there is so much water

  we might as well waste this ever-replenished

  fairy-tale stuff don’t flinch she said

  I want you to walk this carpet

  please oh please

  you must be so so

  footsore after your ten-year war you surely

  deserve a little something if you

  take off your shoes the bare floor will be so cold so

  filthily infectious you should step down safely

  here

  That man is doomed that very second

  the swelling blood-shade shows through his skin

  even as he bashfully sets his foot down saying

  after all I’m not nobody maybe I deserve a little

  brighter something than my allotted brightness

  no superstition has ever hurt an honest man perhaps

  after my bath in my towel I can walk it

  again

  Inside his lifted foot in its falling pause

  Fate feeds on this weakness and the same

  massive simplicity cuts through his throat

  as drips and sways in all these

  tide

  filled

  caves

  the same iridescent swiftness and the same

  uncertain certainty either brimming or rippled

  or swelling over of hollowing water

  as one thought leads to another if you stand

  here on these boulders with your back to the earth

  you can see the whole story of the weather

  the way the wind brings one shadow after another

  but another one always sweeps up behind

  and no-one can decipher this lucid short-lived

  chorus of waves it is too odd and even

  as if trying to remember some perfect prehistoric


  pattern of spirals it is too factual too counter-factual

  too copper-blue too irregular-metrical

  listen

  Let me tell you what the sea does

  to those who live by it first it shrinks then it

  hardens and simplifies and half-buries us

  and sometimes you find us shivering in museums

  with tilted feet so that all we can do is lie flat

  our colourful suffering faces watered away

  we who threw fish-lines into these waves

  and steadied our weight in mastless longboats

  and breathed in and out the very winds that wrecked us

  And there are herons there are sea-ravens

  whose wingspan is a whole awning

  they could lift a man’s flesh off its framework

  and cormorants like eroded crows

  and angled ospreys and harpies

  all kinds of long-beaked hungers

  peer from the trees and any minute now

  with smashing of wings and probing of steel-grey pins

  they’ll come for these eyes oh horrible

  flightless

  light

  I’ve always loved the way when night happens

  the blood is drawn off is sucked and soaked upwards

  out of the cliff-flowers the way they worn out

  surrender their colours and close and then the sky

  suffers their insights all the shades of mauve green blue

  move edgelessly from west to east the cold

  comes ghostly out of holes and the earth it’s strange

  as soon as she shuts her sky-lids her hindsights open

  and you can see right out through her blindness

  as far as the ancient stars still making their precise points

  still exactly visible and then not exactly

  well there was and there was not a drowned woman

  still visible underwater crossing a field

  there she walks nothing can shift that moment

  lodged in her chest when she was kidnapped

  and her outline stayed there forever but she

  now with no character only this salty bitterness

  became a slave she who had rich parents

  began to smell of anger sinking towards unendurable laughter

  which overruns its circle like the sea itself

  on whose blind glare

  a boat appears full of rat-eyed sailors

  squinting from watching too much sea-film

  Image after image it never ends

  it has the texture of plough but with no harvest

  but every so often a flower of light floats past

  and one of them slept with her which is a woman’s weakness

  we must keep it she said hidden under eyelids

  put lampshades on this eagerness if we meet

  at the fountain for example washing our clothes or drinking

  but after a while he grew bored of this patience

  he came to her door with necklaces

  she had a needle in her hand she looked up sharp

  and her mind slipped like snow off a leaf

  but the gods know everything they sent a virus

  fluttering after the ship and seven days later

  she dropped like a dead bird into the bilge

  four sailors had to swing her over the side and the water

  with all its claws and eaters closed over her

  the splash became a series of dots and

  under that sound the green sea turned

  grey

  Transparent wisps of things with eye-like organs

  sink to the seabed in shells of extraordinary beauty

  and at sunset the smells float out orange

  and settle on the flowers’ tongues while sea-whips

  thrash thrash the water for a living

  nobody cares whether there is weeping or oozing

  or the flavour of dead flesh fills the evening

  and when the wind shifts you can hear a man

  shouting for help

  cursing his wounded foot but

  nobody answers

  Only night-birds eating insects

  whirring and dialling in the small hours

  expressing no emotion only existence

  always laughing and screaming the same fact

  stacked on every twig not every sound

  is a voice not every breath is a self

  but anything

  knocked by a sudden blow

  has the same unspecified shrillness oh I

  feel like a glued fly giving up and standing up and

  time and again stuck in the same pain if only

  my foot could move my thought

  and think of a cure but my thoughts can’t

  lift their wings and every struggle

  tangles me lower I wish I was

  there or

  there

  Misfortune I wish I could meet you

  underwater in your deep green room

  and flannel your bloodshot eyes

  and brush your dead hair

  they say there is a flash of mercy

  concealed in your face-folds

  if only a person has time to swim down

  and find it

  there are soft chairs no windows

  no noise except the self-closing stone door

  which I opened once

  and found myself in a chamber of options

  a little sea-cleft where the salmon drift

  and turn into humans

  but Fate is not Fortune

  I was not fated to find you there

  only the converging walls

  the tilted

  floor

  And once a fisherman poking among the mackerel

  pulled out a human head whose head

  tell me muse about this floating nobody

  the one who would have drowned but a river

  coming looking for him with swerves

  and trailing beard-hair how secretive it is

  when water moves through the sea

  keeping its muddiness intact and fish commuters

  hurry under him as if motioning him in

  this river touched his hand who is it

  honourable river-god is it you he said

  o cold tap cold mouth pick up this message o help me

  I come to you upside-down with empty suckers

  crawling along the sea surface on my knees

  stripped of everything even gravity have mercy

  Tell me muse about this ancient passer-by

  who found himself adrift in infinite space

  with all the planets flying in loops around him

  like listless gods

  all kinds of light and unlight he witnessed

  until his eye-metal rusted away

  and now there is no going back no edge no law

  no horizon or harbour-wall or rubble breakwater

  can keep out this formless from his sightless

  nevertheless the grey sea-voice lapping at his skull

  even through closed teeth goes on whispering

  There was once a stubborn man

  searching the earth for the guillemot that speaks

  who came at last to the breakneck cliffs and paused

  a sleek bird studied him as if to say

  you must be that southerner

  fated to die of fright if I speak

  and a woman once let go of her posture

  and shoved herself in a barrel onto the waves

  it felt so right to feel her thoughts

  hitting her skull

  one person has the character of dust

  another has an arrow for a soul

  but their stories all end

  somewhere

  in the sea

  Then we went down to the sea to our black boat

  first we dragged the boat into the lively water

  and set
up mast and sails and drove the sheep on board

  then climbed in ourselves depressed crying lukewarm tears

  and our hostess who is a goddess long-haired inhuman

  but her language is human except when she sings

  those bitter grief-songs sent a fair wind

  like a friend following a few steps behind

  and we busied about securing the ship’s tackle

  and sat in our places while the wind and the pilot steered us out

  all that day the sails at full-stretch drew us over the water

  until the sun sank and the roads let slip their shadows

  then our boat reached the outer edge of the sea

  that feeling of water in its own world moving underneath us

  where the blind people live lost under a cloth of fog

  and the sun can never burn through it to find them

  not when it floats up into space

  not when it turns and sinks into the earth

  but night always stretches a dark membrane over those people

  And there I saw the crumpled criminal face of someone

  in the fog of her body not knowing what she did

  she murdered her husband obscene night

  first the gods found out then everyone else

  but she her whole soul strangled with horrors

  knelt in the bathroom scrubbing and scrubbing