Lit.-Mag #36
Home & Homecoming

4 Poems

touch

turn upon turn not getting there

ornamental lines over rectangles

lines broader than rivers’ flowing
through streams they’ve cut, bleeding in soil

lines harder and more impermeable
than paths and tracks
sharing a variety
of straightness; while lands mark up, or
dash about; somehow propelled,
impelled by misapprehensions

nature is ambulatory

I touch therefore I live

St Ives Harbour from The Malakoff

white right up in
the middle of green
and the green’s on blue
poured on it still
liquid underneath

St Ives, March 2002
[The Malakoff is a point high up above old St Ives
– where there is now a small bus station]

St Ives Harbour

sun into a square
tries to circle
encircling the island

yellow green sand
blue green water

St Ives, April 2002

Poldhu

whole sea is in air, flying
ocean entirety
white glare
grey
gull-headed
hovering
rolling out
of darkness for
coast edge

an illusion,
all’s one to water,
what it can’t reach, land,
flooding its usual motion,
what it does
all times

trans posed
poised no panache
about to,
remember,
on rocks butterfly
rocking colour mass
at one remove

 

[Pol dhu is Cornish / Kernewek for “dark water” or just “black pool”
– and the name of a bay on the west of The Lizard peninsula]