Orford, After - a prose poem

1
Our father - six foot something – moved in a slow river stride that day, cut off his fingers like seeds & sowed them in autumn heavy silt - he never noticed Charon waiting in the dunes squat-arsed & chimney throated, belching. In spring we pale forms of future Saxon boys n’ girls ripened, Papa held each dormant face & kissed mud between our lips to give us our first sounds, that tidal itch in the throat; & so, job done, succumbing to salt erosion, the bite of the wind, Daddy snapped like a twig upon the sand; & Charon came down, his boots clacking in the mud. We waited while the minnivers & gulls along the shore grew alert to his great passing & cried out over the sea.

2
A mother – not ours – came close with spade & scraping tools, foraging in the cradle area. She ignored us sleeping children of the yellow silt & recovered Dada’s remains in the grey. She knew his face, bent to, & chuckled; funny that she recalled him well having never met him, but his smell & this time together aroused her love.

And what did she do for love? Turned him inside out with a blade as long as her arm, guts free & muscles slapping the kaolin; that blue tongue, his original fertilising organ, she sliced & prepared for us with onions in the embers of his pyre where his dull petulance spat the fat of him out into the shallows & upon the dunes, where it hardened to smelly puce & gulls had their feast of it & pepper grew from its core & we got sick from the stench but enthused all the same realising that was the way to learn more. Our instar bodies gorged with sentences.

Mother walked to the tidemark, leaving hollow steps in the mud, the note of canaries on the wind in her wake. Beyond her tired eyes the Sea closed in. The rich sounds of a port funnelled through the night screen. When she slept she asked questions which she bequeathed us, our juvenilia, things which preoccupy still, some philosophers' misteriosa. Then she became an early skiff, her deck sound, strong; she held kelp between her fingers & carried a sense of the divine along the coast; her ears flapping in a magnetic surge, the point of man's arrival. The blue haze over the water she gave form & solidity, garnishing her tiller with what it became: ocean lapis, icy baubles for marketeers.

3
Now scuppers live close by, they'll be surprised when we awake tomorrow, running blind along the spit, sand flying & tables turned in panic; they'll make their way toward the burial ground, this Saxon swipe, & bloody days will come, vengeance mown with swords or baton rounds & those who are more fortunate will prey on the eventuality of our words, making them their own. Invaders come to name names in woods, along the beach front & crest, treating us as runts to be disowned & drowned, forgetting this was our birth right too: the estuaries ours, mercurial maps of heart & tongue, the cornerstones of history, entry, defence; where the flight paths of the Skua & the shaven-headed warriors converge; our past is direct, combustible, & as sweet as the rock which rots teeth, sours your stomach with tartrazine. Our hospitable, fortunate lagoon, our family, our umbrella, our metaphysical water & our real, our policy of safety in troubled times - where will it go?

4
We are given mercury as fresh aid to our reasonable quest, our exile, to be walked on & littered with our grey dreaming west. The flux of travel toward invisible parenthood no map could give us recourse or parallel journey’s good; no compass the respite of sure direction; too tough, more so then in January's bitter slough we move to Orford; that creature of shale falsehood with pioneers in dust naming horror vehicles their brood, relics of forward-backward motion equally tired, tried sequences of reparation & failed trust, repeating actions that had no meaning, blistered skins falling here to the sound of incoming sin.

And ready items came as no reward - a ketch in shadow, a cutter called Ganymede, bitter cargo in the prow to the Zeider Zee & the Channel Run far; inarticulate references - a ‘Hallelujah’ to end without effort - cold fate in cold wartime & the abrupt cessation of comfort on the shoreline.

5
So mercury coats layers of the smooth coast, marred only by demon breakers & their kiss at sea, pale flesh mocking modality on a tossing plate - which perhaps we might call the anchor of prophecy.

We had brief shore leave before this century began: black-cat euphoria unburdened in alleyways, falling out of open portholes like a leaden madrigal, background noise to squelching mouths in taverns, the vicious quartet of nomads on the jetty, blind setters of the task, able-bodied radar suckers bringing sex & lawless hooves to temptations' angry path. We would survive them, but only just. They asked for bribes, a ready assortment, but they did not realise the deal: a year & a day before chambers flood, kisses eased from dying lips, high tides to carry the horses over apocalypse. When Saturn mounts a fiery birth, combats earth in bitter rhymes as roses might spread in falling through nonplussed gravity. The burning tiger & the unwieldy scribe aboard a chariot. The Jesus metaphor begging to be allowed on board to stow away, to run with us & hide forever. The exodus hunting for parenthood, the restless urge constant, an orbit driven, upending all security, the sweet skulls exposed, the river curving hard against the current & the ship born to rocks & we are not forgiven, for even orphans must sometimes pay their dues.

Orford Ness & Suffolk elsewhere - 2006-08

charnel house days (a free roaming meditation of medieval ghosts)

black wind in the hollows & we three are fumbling, laden but without substance; fandangos & brine for air; wretched carnal creatures dividing lust & passing through these nocturnal avenues, simpering pimp corners – our homesteads now; we rise at the foot of night and retreat on the edge of dawn & between our feet stamp/beat/cajole a rhythm for the insane, corrupting, insouciant, taking hold of the nubile (male, female, other) & run them to earth like sweating horses, corrupted skin bleeding white foam & other muscle agonies/ecstasies until released & we’ll watch them baulk for more, the rev & pump of their flesh engines, wild banners skit & flap, leaping players, card sharps there in the latent blue shade where the whispers of deathly mediocrity have dispersed, the fruitful summoned down, the tiny ivory angels coming to roost, singing in their throats, battering their wings on the doors of the houses of administration willing downfall; & on our way the smell of bodies rising from the grass blades, the tree creepers etching pretty patterns, scars of exposed sap & in there too the seeping red miasma of human blood, scorched, delineated by ages and history’s chanting, subtle vowels, the arc of a new language in the gullet straining to leap, to gather pace & value & form; we three listen like mutes, we snuck up in motley; then in the last hour are laughing, coarse, extreme; we linger at the edges no more, come down among them kissing shoulders & rallying the deviants, making merry with gods & goddesses, the rolling, writhing irony of belief laid waste, shoved into itself & replayed for the next generation; the dawn strikes the bell, the clanging gorge of metal turns the ribald asunder, the charnel house opening its mouth & spewing out ancestors for one last view, one last breath of air, green, gaseous air passing into dead lungs & escaping, hissing, from the rotten forms until they are banged up once more, returned to their depth, hidden in stone & we three, watching the shades of the living retreat, hurrying like ants, back to their homes before the day can strike them are turning once again to the place from which we came . . .

Mystery Lane

S’a strange thing to be walkin’ east-west through this town and to know that there is a lane, a cut, part of the medieval grid that can get you shortcutwise into town BUT when you return i.e. west-east, the lane has gone, disappeared, not to be found despite lengthy meanderings up and down the locale. Yep, jus’ gawn. Medieval alchemy and divination at work? Some wrinkled furrow-brow sitting in his garret with the stench of quicksilver ‘n’ lead pouring forth in the lee of the Norman gate, putting a curse on some enemy and ne’er getting it off again so we still tumble down the confusion centuries later? I think so. Yes. So Whiting Street and Bridewell lane be accursed! Sheesh. Disorientation, enthralling disorientation like Alice, up and down we go without any real chance of deciding for ourselves . . . who shall we be following, sirrah?

The party howlers arrive and disgorge their fat love in the living room, urinating epithets of mutual appreciation and pseudo-celebrity love-in-ness. Fantasy island in the Suffolk hollows . . .

And bleary eyed ne’er do wells linger in the doorway eager to fry the fat and taste it too. Shittin’ a brick for jesus replacements and other class A’s. S’all in there for a few hours. While the older man upstairs, his lingering scribe ancestry depleted for an evening, sleeps fitfully, disturbed by their reverie and calls out (unheard) for the world to shut its mouth til morning and leave him in peace approximately. Oh aye! How they move these magi. Wandering and arched down Sparhawk Lane or lost in the Kevelaer shadows, with the brook idling in their ears and the sweet marjoram stuffed in gills and nostrils.