Through the Parting Grey
Where do we hide?
In the wilt of a holiday past, the twenty years of looking out;
scavenging, the eager films rolling on,
of downy feathers left in a nest
and my father finding me a stick
to steady the heather dressed cliffs
with purple palms, falling giddy over the rocks.
In the summer I was born curious. Through gentle greys
I collected the sea and filled my buckets up to the brim
thinking about the horizon and the dangling ships,
latticing seaweed just in case
the distance left them lost,
eaten up with the raspberry sky.
It always warmed me, looking up;
catching the birth of every thread,
sewing castles onto the paths I trod.
I strung out the arctic on the back of a whale -
my hair in the wind, an ecstatic octopus -
and always vowed to dream.
But just to dream
all these years, could not be enough.
It would not fit the little boat in the little green bottle,
escape those tutting sounds; the parting greys
hoping to drown
the life so plastic around a seagull’s mouth.
To move the grey into the blue,
to fuel each loss I felt, bowed down to -
I could not excuse
the sea for stealing me into a shyness
that would consume
or the lighthouse for her blinking eye.
I was too gathered in the tide, the whispers on my shelf
of things left; coral lunged
in the days and nights I held
like sleeping driftwoods;
the brush of my skin -
salt taken from their cheek.
What came to be was held in the palm of what was left;
the other side of a shell
coiled in an ear drawn in the sand,
whispering stories to a man
who could take me back and through the parting grey -
the years outside the lighthouse scope
of a coastline so far the precipice -
our words like hands heaving up the cliff.
