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Andrew Shelley |
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Island Wild island wind at freezing morning we wake on the beach in the grey light of first-landing- stark winter that by noon will be blazing high summer's feast I'm still lying to one side of you between your half- parted thighs sweating slightly in the sleeping- bag moment just after having made love has cast us up as its debris of bones and white-washed limbs on this strange shore where time has not yet come a salt-curl tendril of weed, half- wet, dries on the rock your thighs are clammy and inside night-heat is cold now filament dries to ensign rock rises from sea, memorably blown wind sands us awake not wanting to be grit in our eyes, we'll rub them open and, still joined by sea-threads wind will untangle us and we'll rise to find the path to the interior II She lifts the old man's boy who comes to our window and passes him to me I lift him too by under the arms the zinc folding table is painted flaking green showing grey evening she dresses me in her black clingy dress and we fuck At night an enormous spider on the wall she says kill it towards dawn a bird cries winging over the crater- mass III Everyone is naked from a higher path we see the women with their legs open to the sun going bronze In the shallows for cool she straddles my kneeling thighs pressed tight together seaswell of afternoon bears home into her glinting calm wholly apparent here at this inch of infinite she rides the buoyant upsurge and it enters her in one or two laps of its vast she comes great weight present in the gentlest of its plashes as in the mouth the concentration of the love-making body here at the margins of a dense mass decaying takes our little weight on its scales themselves weighing nothing when we separate a thin twist of white uncoils from between our parting legs joined writing IV From a little out to sea the visible area of beach is a stage nudes move on we mount spiralling the green hill to where the white church appears now and then closer but we never reach we feed figs to a donkey it follows us on the way down clouds and blue sea she reads a paper and has to return she's angry not having made it to the church and the donkey kept following to the edge of its walled field in the morning the street flowing with people sings a song we are not part of lying no longer lustful and the sea is choked with strange underwater grass that's warm when you step in it in the playground back in the city the children have just returned we sit amid their voices in a square at the end alone later in glow of afternoon radiance I disturb the soft watery sand in the shallows uncovering a half-buried razor-shell skull sand was its flesh what Išve carried for so long burnt down to this line of drying shoreweed only what doesn't need words survives element some things swim in outside grounded carried this with me for years that's all it was the symbols As the gilt flaked away from the moldering symbols in eczema patches of rust and chrome, we saw inside, how rotten they were, how putrefying, how fabricated from piss and plaster gone so hard it crumbled away, like ancient icing, mite- -riddled cheese, old wedding-cake. How they squatted and cluttered up the tops of the walls, crowded us out, into the background, carping for tribute, multiplying, all in our godeaten bodies. In the creaking church's hulk and the sanctum's hull, groaning like an oaken keel with boredom and with exertion, they started to fall about us, upon us, like gifts from heaven, Christmas cloudburst, or the insides of some huge carcass slaughtered high up in the sky. We ducked, covered our heads, our faces, for shame, for pity's sake, in heaven's name (for God's love started to run) while certain members of the congregation moved among us and and koshed us on the skull with crowbars to imitate the feel of the falling symbols' impact. Some of them wanted to stick our severed heads up on poles around the vacant evacuated fresco-space as substitutes for the fallen, evaporating symbols. We poured out of the raped church of downpouring symbols clutching our breasts, our chests, our loved ones. In the place of four statues three fell, one remained, standing in the fire. We clustered home, clasping pink and chrome derelict bits of symbol and carefully stuck them into albums to commemorate the dead or began to elaborate new and brazen ones, just the same as the old, out of the junk in the dead-woman's room, never opened till then. Charred hymnals and rotting leaves littered the pews and the rain fell steadily through the burnt out eaves and pattered on wet paper and the altar desecrated with candle-stubs, obscene slogans, blackened tins and spoons, syringes, lumps of tar, the carcasses of sacrificed cats, small rodents. Everything was suspended at the moment just before it collapsed, with a sigh of old flour in sacks burst open, cloud of stale make-up, clown's face paint, chalk dust of bones. Stormlight came raining in on the altar strewn with crushed-out match-heads (with which we ground in witty little eyes for the torn-out cigarette-paper-men). Fire-eaten beams high against the louring sky. Black birds perching |