Ross leaned on the sill and looked out of the open evening window, called by the swifts. They swerved above, katana wings cutouts against the dipping sun; below, silhouettes of scythes sped across the late-drying sheets that hung from the balconies. He had seen them at home, where the Water reached the northern sea, but here they tumbled in shrieking crowds between the close red buildings and across the shining bay. He could go and get his camera or – no, perhaps not. It was enough to see them, and hear their bosun whistles, and remember them. His heart was of the sea and his hands of the sun; their cries were in his ears, and he smiled.
Sea
The wood you stand on
The wood you stand on, washed up flotsam on the stones,
once held my father’s weight above the waves;
the rusted bolt you kick with a thoughtful frown
kept closed the press which held his family maps.
It will be a found feature in your off-white apartment,
a reminder of the sea to bring the old outdoors inside.
Treat it kindly, with due respect.
It held safe their lives until that day
and now outlives them.
Living with a poet
The nets on the quayside are not the wiles with which I charmed you. They’re nets. They’re not the fisherfolk’s dreamcatchers that took our ambition. They’re nets.
The dinghy bobbing on the incoming tide is not your spirit that soared when you first saw me at the party. It’s a boat. It’s not our hopes and dreams before the love tide turned. It’s a boat.
The gulls that swoop down on the flecks of foam are not poembirds. They’re gulls. They are not lyric snatchers from the frothing deep. They’re gulls.
My heart is not – my heart is not a cartoonish pink, arrow-pierced. It’s my heart. It’s not, I’m afraid, any words that you may say. It’s my heart. And yes, it’s broken, but it will mend.
My grandad would bunk off school
My grandad would bunk off school and go swimming. When he went home, his mother would taste the salt in his hair and box his ears. He would bend over me as we looked toward the mainland and taste my hair. “You’ve been swimming!” And I would try to dodge the gentle cuffs.
I would try to hold one of his hands in both of mine and study the tattoo on his forearm and the scar he said was caused by a bullet. Then on the way home he would tell me one of the stories I must have known were impossible but believed with all my heart. And still do.
Stefano crouched on the sharp volcanic rocks
Stefano crouched on the sharp volcanic rocks. Below him in the shade-dark water a sea urchin tipped back and forth in the rising swell, precisely as it had a million years before. Stefano looked at the sole of his foot. The broken spines were thin and black below the reddened skin.
He looked out. The wind from the north whipped the sea into low white-flecked waves closely lined together, like hard-packed sand at low tide. The inflatable mattress was moving fast.
His diving knife was strapped to his calf as always. He thought of things that should never happen and dived into the water. The first bodylength down was summer warm; when he hit the cold from the underwater springs he arched his back and arrowed through the bubbles to the surface. The mattress was further out and further down the channel, still red he knew but black against the heat-white horizon.
The sun worshippers on the rocks around him did not see his dive raise a trail of spray. Only the girl rolling a herbal cigarette saw the knife. She reached for her phone.
The wavelets smacked his face as he swam overarm towards the mattress and the shape lying motionless on it. The water whipping off the crests of the waves felt like sand in a desert storm. He realised his habit was to turn his head to the left to breathe. Now into the wind. He had left his goggles on the rocks. But he never swam without his knife.
The mattress was closer now, drifting fast. The form on it had not stirred. He turned on his back to rest a little. His knife was still there. He touched its handle, cold in the cold water. One last effort.
He breathed in deeply and ploughed on, shoulders stretching. The only cloud in the sky passed across the sun and the sudden shade woke him from his effort. Arms and lungs burning he arrived at the mattress as the wind whipped the waves higher. He held on with one hand and felt himself being pulled through the water, out towards the open sea.
He thought.
With a single strike, he slashed the mattress with his knife. It folded, crumpled and disappeared below them. Now the wind and waves would not take them so easily.
The girl speaking on the phone shaded her eyes with her hand and saw the two black dots in the blue. One disappeared, then the other, then both reappeared. They were moving slowly towards the coast but faster along it. She lost view of them around a high outcrop and closed the phone call. ‘Too late,’ she whispered. ‘Too late.’
Island
We swam to the island together. The wind got up, and the waves. The next morning his father rowed out. I never saw him again.
Changing the guard at the sea
At the Marina bar an hour after sunrise, early sunseekers with their cappuccini and cornetti swirl and eddy around the nightclub exiters, cold water, give me cold water. The tribes mix like suntan cream and seawater.
An hour later the tattooed late-night swimmers trail up from the rocks, eyes red with salt and sleeplessness, beer bottles half full of cigarette butts and ash. The greatgrandparents distract the children with promises of coloured fish.
Seaside experience
His slow black car was spattered with green-white gullmuggings and smelled of fish. The thuggish depositor eyed him and cawed.
Inspired by a twitter conversation with @ropoem and @TangledFox
I swam fast
I swam fast, knife held tight. You lay on the mattress, eyes closed. A single strike slashed. Now the tide would not take you.
Realistic, real
I thought her tattoo was very realistic. But as people saw the tanned Jesus on her shoulder crying tears of blood, they began to cross themselves. Some knelt. Some hissed as she reached her towel and her friend wiped away the signs that she had scratched herself on the lava rocks as she climbed out of the water. His eyes were blue.
simonsalento 