The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Stephen Devereux
Jack Clemo was a Cornish poet whose father was a chinaI picture them as large and white with clay, like Rodin's. They struggle with small objects, are honed for holding up large thoughts, fending off storms. He holds his pen, as I see him, like a dark blade, cutting the white sheet. And when his ears closed down and his eyes turned around the words flowed clearer as his hands lost their clay. It had fallen from his father's clothes, his arched fingers on the one table until the sea washed him clean and threw him naked back up the beach. I think of those hands freed of seeing, hushed of sound, knowing the landscape, the wind's howl precisely at the point they left him. As they touched her hair they found all that he thought his god had denied him when he had only combed the dark rocks fruitlessly. Lamprey Tube of cartilage in a skin bag. Seven portholes along each side. Like a prototype submarine. A fish that was before fish. The throat a rosette, an anemone of teeth. A jawless shark. The eyes gentle, shy almost, like a calf's. It has no strategy any more than it has a conscience. Its lip feels for the flank of a fish that lives as fish should live then hooks on at right angles. Tenderly. There's no ambush, no struggle. Only a slow puckering kiss. But, though the shy eye still gazes, looks quietly around, the ring of incisors tightens, the throat muscles suck until the bream becomes as thin as paper. Snowfall Cancels what was written on the earth, resets the clock of love at nought, hushes the river's catechism, undeciphers the spider's bible- but writes its blue on the fields' white pages, remembers the form of each of its crystals, knows our nakedness. After the stiff birds have fallen and the oak bark split, the bones of the homeless scraped from the shop doorways and the child's rosy cheeks are paled, everything begins again. Do it now before the black rises through the white. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |