Another door opens

Bits and bobs......a poem from a very black day, now long past, it seems. As it's spring, it seemed a good time to post it. A waking dream, and a sketch. Come to think of it, there's a working title there.

*Editor's note on Poetry MyArse II: Hyperbole can be subtly deployed. I actually own more than one book of English poetry, my lover was not contemporaneous with my husband, etc. etc. ;-) Poetic licence, I do declare.

Time and Tide

October 7 2013

I walked out, in black like a mourner, my quotidian garb

To get the air, and fell to thinking as I walked, downriver with my thoughts

Not only of what was, but might have been

Like wave on wave yearning towards the highest water-mark

Of equinoctial tide, that night of a full moon, which shines one year in ten

And ever after the waves rush vainly in, but falling short

Ebbing down all the years, detritus of tarnished treasure left behind

Dreams unfulfilled, love lost, and burdens too heavy for the tide to carry more.

What are dreams but aspirations?

Sighs exhaled year on year to dying breath

Mine and yours intermingled, by troth.

I walked that tideline last at equinox, all lost in mist, where sand seemed to stretch 

Into infinity across the estuary

You were not there.

On this most grey of days, I walk again the rivercourse, my birthright

Perusing all that went before and yet may come.

For Winter is upon us, lit only by the solstice cipher of Christmas, and distant hope

Of Spring, remote but sure.

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During wind and rain

On the long, dark, windy winter’s nights, she dreamed, still half-awake, that the house was a ship, its old timbers shifting; cracking and groaning as she rode the waves, high above the storm, in the safeness of her bed. The room was at the south-west end, the weather corner, and faced into the prevailing wind. That wind rattled the sash windows, and sometimes the entire bulk of the old house seemed to shift. The noise woke her on such nights- the howl and shush of the wind, and the many noises of the house itself- but she never cared, knowing she floated in the warmth of the big bed, far above the turmoil. When she had been younger, in the early days of a failed marriage, with the woes of the world upon her, she used often wake with a start, convinced that the gale outside might bring down the entire gable chimney, mentally calculating if a fall from that height would deposit the masonry right onto the bed, which occupied the centre of the wall facing the chimney breast. She could never quite calculate, half-asleep, so she never quite slept.

Somewhere  along the line, she had outgrown such imaginary concerns. When had she stopped worrying? When he no longer lived there? When finally, after many years, she secured a divorce, and the house was finally hers, though it had been her parents’ before the marriage, her childhood home, the house she was brought up in? Was it, rather more mundanely, when she had had the chimney repaired, so that chunks of rotten brickwork no longer crashed down into the hearth during nights of wind and rain. Why only at night? Or was it because she was only there to hear it fall at night? And was the beast within the walls, rather than without, all that time?

There had been many such nights in recent weeks, when one storm followed another, at the height of the solar cycle. She often woke and listened abstractedly, but as much as the sound of the wind disturbed her slumbers, the sound of the falling rain soothed her. Only this last night gone had she imagined the superstructure of the house breaking completely free from its foundations, and sailing away westwards up the street, cresting the great swell of the rising high street, on the beginning of a cross-country journey.

Perhaps it was like the long-ago resolution of the teeth dream, supposedly one of those archetypal dreams. She had dreamt it as a recurring nightmare, in her late teens. Then, in her twenties, having dreamt again the pain of a blow to the mouth, the sweet-salt taste of blood, the horror of spitting shattered enamel and bone, the nightmare of disfigurement, a dream-voice spoke: 'You know you can have implants?', and that was the end of that.

For many years, she had felt the house to be a veritable prison: psychological, financial, even the physical embodiment of an abusive relationship, of unwanted family ties, of remoteness and social isolation. She could not have, for the longest time in actual terms, move away, whether or not she wished to. It was not her choice while it was not her house. And now all that was gone: the prison bars had melted away, so much so  the that the old house had blown, that week, off its very moorings, and sailed away into the night, while she stood at the helm, sure at last of her seaworthiness.

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So good they named it twice..... (a sketch)

The town occupies a position at the top of the estuary, at the point where the longest river on the island began the final stage of it journey down to the sea.  In bygone times, it was built at a strategic point, controlling movement further upriver, and well-placed to ward off incursions from the larger kingdom on the far bank. It was a gateway to the rest of the island, a stepping-stone to a conquest. The sea-coast of the hinterland was unguarded, and that was how they had sneaked in, travelling cross-country to this settlement.

The small houses of the Irishtown clung to the side of the steep hill that tumbled down to the water’s edge, but the main street was lined with the large houses of prosperous merchants of other days, and spoke of lost glories and better times. Not much more than half-a-century before, the town had ceded its importance to the new deepwater port a few miles downstream, and on the opposite bank, in enemy territory. The old enmity was played out these days in hurling matches, and county planning, where every provincial town came to boast at least one unneeded mega-shopping complex. That tide had turned now too, leaving empty hulks of unwanted developments scattered like so many shipwrecks, and in the case of the old town here, with its heart hollowed out by careless development on the periphery, so that the grand plaster and timberwork of the grand old houses rotted and crumbled for want of money to repair, and tenants to rent. For much of the town was still owned by absentee landlords, an anachronism these days for most of the country, but not here, in the oldest stronghold of the interloper. For that is how many of the townspeople still saw them, so many centuries later, though history records that they came to be “more Irish than the Irish themselves” and few souls in an island nation can boast other than that they came here from somewhere else.

The steep hills produced a town which to the visitor was full of charm: tiny artisan houses in terraces, narrow winding streets, dotted with old churches, where the remains of the old city wall dividing interloper from native still materialised here and there. It was best navigated on foot, as the steepness of the gradient meant that roads often ended in a cul-de-sac. In the last generation the town had been gifted with a one-way system that provided much merriment to the locals, arising from the frustration of visitors, depending on the temperament of the driver or the urgency of the appointment. From the top of the town, the view of the river was indeed lovely, if one could ignore the brooding behemoth presence of the abandoned fertiliser factory on the western bank.