Stones.
1
I cannot see my misshape in others’ eyes
here in the blackness. I am innocent
as the child was until..
“Until?” she asked;
“Let me hold you…”
* *
He wondered,
staring at the sea-smooth stone
on his table,
the squid-ink writing,
the questions anyone
might ask: who placed it on the foreshore
for him to stumble over,
its meaning.
Fascinated:
deciding to return.
2
Cradled I wept
for my first love
How I reeled away
giddy, nauseous,
from the boy’s words
spat above her face
which looked ……
and ran here.
And hid.
And howl.
“Howl now,” she whispered.
* * *
Was it for him? Was he intercepting
others’ discourse?
His intervention….
Drawn to the beach
looking for a message
on a stone bottle
he had found the second
upon a pile of others
carried it home
heavy with voice
in his hands.
3
What does the light hold for me?
Rejection.
What does dry land hold for me?
Inadequacy.
“You are officially a monster.” she said.
* * *
Three stones
two gaps
one ……
who has become a collector
and now sits
interrogating mineral,
a participant,
the drama not understood.
He grins, determines,
plans.
Meeting
1
Both sniff,
peer into the darkness
as if wanting helped.
Both want certainty.
The sea
silent as the land
only the wind
Both wait,
one for the other to move.
He is still as the rocks
he crouches behind.
He is silent as the cave
at his back.
Both wait,
willing
the heart silent,
the pulse still.
For what seems like hours.
Blackness.
One knows
the other is moving
but cannot see,
One knows
there is an awareness
but cannot stop.
No breathing
then
so softly
stone chink
and it is over.
2
They seem to him
a child’s footprints
through his shadow
from the cave and back again
but it had not felt like a child,
that presence, and the stone
no more intelligible
than the others.
He straightens,
hand above his eyes
scans the shore,
the honeycombed cliff,
where a goat herd
on a thin-grassed meadow
recoils from the roar
from the vent in the ground.
3
Stone chink,
then –
“I have left a message.”
he calls to the retreating panic:
“I like your poems.”
4
He stares sightless
at where he knows the bottle is
where he put it
on a flat topped slab
lapped by the water,
after two days and nights.
He knows it is for him,
this intrusion into his loneliness,
unsolicited and unwanted;
he bobs in the water
face to the rock
afraid.
Legend
She told her daughter
when she asked
that her father was a hero
who saved her mother
and eleven other Athenians
from starving or
drowning where he lived
deep in the sea-caves
on the Cretan shore,
led them to the open sea
but would not follow.
“Lovely inside,
which is where good is.”
she told the child
who nodded gravely.