LEGERDEMAIN
Perhaps a foot or so beneath the surface
of this beach is water – some the vestige
of the ebbing sea, most seeped from low cliffs
above the sands then imperceptibly
vanishing among the gritty particles.
Suddenly, from below the horizon,
a plume of black smoke emerges – as if,
for a moment, a coal powered steamer
were returning south. An oil rig, no doubt,
is burning off its excess methane
to dissipate into the distant nimbus.
Over a hole dug in the sand the shadow
of a herring gull glides slowly, the bird
briefly imaged in the shallow, tawny pool,
its snowy feathers dulled.
Jeff Teasdale
August 1, 2022Thanks so much for these, David. Reading these, heading south in France…. First, Antony Gormley in Den Hague, then Rubéns in Antwerp, then a sudden and unexpected memorial to 10000 1914 unknown dead in the Marne Valley today ….. and now your poignant poems by the river in Auxerre. It’s been quite a week! Just raising a glass of local Chablis to you… and all of them.
Clive Watkins
August 15, 2022This set of snapshots moves quietly towards a hinted-at mystery. There are things literally below the surface, vestiges and seepings, that vanish among “gritty particles”, the product of centuries of unnoticed attrition. The plume of smoke comes from “below” the horizon – seemingly out of a past when such vessels were powered not by oil but by coal. The remainder of the paragraph corrects this impression but awakens thoughts of the destructive excesses of our oil-based economy. Is it relevant to consider that a nimbus is not just a phenomenon of meteorology but a “bright or luminous cloud or cloud-like formation supposedly enveloping or surrounding a deity or supernatural being” (OED)? Anyway, this nimbus – god or cloud – is “distant”. (I particularly like the play of sounds in this patch of the poem.) Then, with the hole in the sand, we are heading down once again till, in a species of augury, the gull’s shadow glides across the beach. Its reflection is caught fleetingly in the “shallow, tawny pool, / its snowy feathers dulled”, a detail that glances back towards the contaminating “plume” of black smoke emerging from the steamer’s funnel far off below the horizon of the present. This complex final image both hints at the mechanisms of atmospheric pollution and climate change and their origins in a past that is not, after all, so very remote and at the same time serves perhaps as omen of a future already terrifyingly at hand.