Gulls think it is for them
that the wormy sand rises,
brooding on its few rights,
losing its war with water.
The mussel flats ooze out,
and now the barnacled, embossed
stacked rocks are pedestals for strangers,
for my own strange sons,
scraping in the pool,
imperilling their pure reflections.
Their bodies are less beautiful than
blue heaven’s pleiades of herring gulls,
or gannets, or that sloop’s sail
sawtoothing the sea as if its
scenery were out of date, as if its
photographs had all been taken:
two boys left naked in a sloughed off summer,
skins and articulate backbones,
fossils for scrapbook or cluttered mantelpiece.
If you look now, quickly and askance,
you can see how the camera’s eye
perfected what was motion and chance before
it clicked on this day and childhood snapshot,
scarcely seen beside
hunched rugby stripes and ugly uniforms –
shy, familiar grins in a waste of faces.
My knee joints ache and crack
as I kneel to my room’s fire, feeding it.
Steam wreathes from my teacup, clouding
the graduate, the lieutenant, the weddings,
the significant man of letters, the politician
smiling from his short victory …
Faces I washed and scolded, only
watched as my each child laboured from his own womb,
bringing forth, without me, men who must
call me mother, love or reassess me
as their barest needs dictate, return
dreaming, rarely to this saltpool in memory,
naked on a morning fall of see-through jellyfish,
with the tide out and the gulls out
grazing on healed beaches,
while sea-thrift blazes by the dry path,
and the sail stops cutting the water to pieces
and heads for some named port inland.
Their voices return like footprints over the sandflats,
permanent, impermanent, salt and sensuous
as the sea is, in its frame, its myth.
1977