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sailors

THE SAME SHARED GROUND

Larks and herons rise from the same shared ground –

a salt-marsh sprinkled with scurvy grass

like early snow. A navigable channel

is impossibly distant, far-off as

childhood’s spring tides. Silt obscured endeavour.

Sailors and milkmaids and priests lie low

as the worked-out coal seams. Glaciers made this –

ice miles, thick as centuries, combing valleys,

teasing out hills, a slow explosion

of seas. I imagine, back in Europe’s

reticular forests, a homely,

mackerel sky caught in another’s vision –

ancient weathers, sand settling in a pool,

pebbles jarred momentarily, the shape

and sense of time.

 

Towing the continent,

hulks sailed west. Only fulmars passed. The past

stretches like a landscape from this instant,

encompassing it. The oneness of things,

their disparateness I taste like blood:

the jest at the heart – being here and now

who could so easily have been elsewhere

or no one. Oblivious of ironies,

soarers and coasters cohabit. The ice

was deep as mountains. I am shrouded in

imagining’s ponderous white oceans.

 

 

 

THE SWELLIES, AFON MENAI, ST VALENTINE’S DAY

Lovers are as mariners, navigators

in crowded, intricate sea lanes of

momentary loathing and lasting passion.

Pilots guided vessels into the straits:

from the north, between Trwyn-du’s dark rocks

and the wicked sands of Dutchman Bank;

from the south, between Abermenai

and Fort Belan over the Caernavon Bar;

and then through The Swellies – Pwll Ceris,

‘Pool of Love’ – where the surging high tides whirl

round Ynys Gored Goch, the wild waves

tawny and their foam white as drifting snow.

Lovers are as sailors in insane storms

and intimate calms, ever watchful

for icebergs and mutinies, heading always

to the Hesperides, course set forever

westwards into the sun.

 

 

 

THE SAME SHARED GROUND

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read583 views
Dee Estuary from Gayton Sands. © Sylvia Selzer 2009.


Larks and herons rise from the same shared ground –

a salt-marsh sprinkled with scurvy grass

like early snow. A navigable channel

is impossibly distant, far-off as

childhood’s spring tides. Silt obscured endeavour.

Sailors and milkmaids and priests lie low

as the worked-out coal seams. Glaciers made this –

ice miles, thick as centuries, combing valleys,

teasing out hills, a slow explosion

of seas. I imagine, back in Europe’s

reticular forests, a homely,

mackerel sky caught in another’s vision –

ancient weathers, sand settling in a pool,

pebbles jarred momentarily, the shape

and sense of time.

 

Towing the continent,

hulks sailed west. Only fulmars passed. The past

stretches like a landscape from this instant,

encompassing it. The oneness of things,

their disparateness I taste like blood:

the jest at the heart – being here and now

who could so easily have been elsewhere

or no one. Oblivious of ironies,

soarers and coasters cohabit. The ice

was deep as mountains. I am shrouded in

imagining’s ponderous white oceans.