I came here then: November,
Or in a light which translates morning
Slowly into visibility; the received walks
Patiently toward the receiver.
The seat anchored me with their weight,
I carried my instruments everywhere and their touch
Was deftly surgical, not explicit like diagnosis
But unearthing the pact they had left to full view.
Each of their links were close as the phrase
Demanded, so unbroken the idea
Of one cannot surface without the other,
Each a continued resonance, the answering beat;
Hearing it alone I mapped its return
To the source, its guarded centre, from where both
Had set out into whatever comes next, leaving their names
Malleable, an inscription to grant them permanence.
And then we came together, certain I could
Match them, or inherit a likeness,
The sheet-metal sea was fixed in our outlook
While the rain perfected you.
At intervals along the drained shore,
Settled to stasis between tidal shifts,
A vacated shell suggests a little
Of the life that gave it up,
Materials bartered for a slow flame
Exhale finally, having collected something of those
Centred around their debris and smoke,
Clinging to fibres, singling them out.
A switched perspective lowers the landmarks
To a framework, allowing us to isolate
The stretch of beach where our
Footprints shorten gradually,
Marking our transience
In a network of shingle and stone,
Where all points here;
To what we are, or might be.
Something rouses them
In a language no onlooker has brought
To fluency, all the same,
We watch as though their motives
Were our own, their tight factions
Splitting ground ward;
An order is given, a sudden closeness sets
A host of limbs into their strict arc,
Signalling an intent we have not guessed,
A multitude stretching themselves
Into flight; we follow them
As best we can,
Our heads trained upward,
Alert to each sharpened diagonal, our feet
Fixed knowingly to the ground.
I
While the shore plays host to its onlookers,
A surviving hoard swept to solid ground,
(Though unafraid to look back),
We adopt vantage points to puzzle one another out,
Fixed to an immediate question;
Whether another’s half absence, half awareness,
Has concentrated the scene into something
We had missed altogether,
Or have looked too long to recognise.
II
With time, after the first visitation,
There is the process of looking outward,
Like lifting the eyes automatically from the page,
As if interrupted, or waiting, with no direction,
For that firmly knowable sea and sky
To become void, without the distinction
Of one resting n the other’s constancy,
To look where we believe there is nothing more
To see, and keep looking.
III
Heading differently to the ordered centre
And its commonplace courtesies
To a point without defining colour,
Knowingly reserved for the passage
Of the once held, remade;
Themselves crossing like travellers
In light craft, which have finally reached
The end of land,
And are sent out willingly.
