(Month of the Precious Blood)
It slows and crawls into the station:
The train’s “hump–hump” on points in work-like fashion
Calls journey’s end, and doors along its length
Vomit this year’s luggaged hordes.
July pours burning heat and dense blue skies
On them; soon, crimsoned flopping flesh like gourds
Will splay the hot-stoned beach. All month the stalls and kiosks
Affording food and beach ware work long hours;
Hotel and pension terraces are full,
And tots’ cries, arcade tunes, disturb the lovers.
The slapping sea churns human flotsam, laughing, thrashing,
Jet skis roar in thumped-chest passion;
Embayed, a bloated cruise boat frees its launches
For two hours’ feeding – water ice or whelks;
Bemused, surfboarded lifeguards crouch on haunches
And chaperone these foolish folks.
“Off-piste,” and life proceeds untouched,
Raw children in their gardens play unwatched;
Shopping and washing done, there’s coffee with
Flames – old, new – and thrill of footing:
Life’s settlement, as always, finely edged.
At harbour, the white fish auction closed, and gutting
And packing underway, a trawler’s beached for prop work;
Come lunch, men will make tryst with tabled pints.
And always halyards chatter, stench of crab
And fish rot sours the streets, noised with the chants
Of gulls at swirl. It’s full tide at the rocks, and terns
Plunge for prey – many times botched,
Then winging, fry in beak. An egret stalks
The rock line, its beak a halberd, stabbing death
For fish and shrimp. Eyeless, a dead gull rucks
In the surf, ignored like a torn cloth.
All’s heartless! Yes: the breeding gulls
On roofs do duty as a hormone pulls,
Feeding their begging fledge reluctantly.
Toppling, screeching, brownly-downed,
The fledglings prance the copings, keen to fly –
Unbalanced, some, wing-thrashing, plunge to ground,
Their parents yapping from a wall as feet or cars
Chivvy the young to a puzzled kerb-edge cower.
Then morning, evening, maelstromed, all erupt
In screaming flight – a disputing, staking blather;
Settled, night long they’ll call, fly, rest, though sleeping little.
Three a.m. a dog-fox prowls;
Spotted, they roar alarm; folk yawn, disturbed.
Next day, adults rebonding quiver in frenzy,
Beaks clashing, chattering; they cease, unverbed.
Language, unfelt, grew from this motley.
Language is structure bred by structure,
By organisms bound by social gesture –
The rat-faced herring gulls example this.
Topping all is Man whose brain,
Protein-engorged, has burst brute physics’ grip,
Creating mind, disbodied, ever keen
To structure further. Thus, a paddle on a log
Becomes a week’s regatta: high-tech yachts
Compete a close-thought course to testing rules,
The winner self-formed by work against those boats.
Hegel, blade-faced, thought this the crux of man’s fulfilment,
Mind’s self-knowledge making contour
Of what’s the case; mind only was what’s real,
Its absolute; but what completion’s that?
Mind presumes data, an existent mell,
Which lacking being must be kept.
