Miriam Gamble

The memory of sun, it is what they subsist upon
down where the jaws snap blindly
at whatever passes, where drifter is a meaningless term

and to hunt is to proffer teeth and tongue
and ghost-lit lantern
into a sea like liquid wind,
without prior compass
of the way the wind is blowing.

Should they be gifted with a corpse
whose half-spoilt flesh holds distillate
eternal summers
spent glittering in the euphotic zone,
they will give gross thanks and, in their way, be holy.

In the cartography of sea,
they are kin not to dragons nor the Stella Maris
but to your own bright band —

yes, you there, eating your sunlight secondhand
from a long-gone grocery display,
drinking it from the guts of lazy lemons.
...

You see the point of putting your feet in,
even full immersing in the shallow sides;
for you, it's about the shock
of the glacial water, that sudden slap of being alive.

You love your body and you walk round naked in it,
like a king, any chance you get;
your nude skin makes you indescribably happy.

I want the facet of a black diamond at its centre,
to hang over the mountain's plug,
over the mouth of hell;
I want to swing like a ludicrous fly in sap.
I cannot think the edges of it matter.

But I too love your substance,
will dust it dry for you in the crystalline air.
...

When I look down into it I see a child who came to grief
off the same horse seven times at the same fence
and a man shouting ‘Do it again! Leaning farther back.
Yer not leaning far enough back' -
and the child rises, dusts herself and does it again,

leans back further, and still the ground is bought
because the man's word on how to handle a drop fence
on this horse is wrong. She doesn't know,
even if she did could not protest
for the man's word on all things equine is law

and anyway buying ground is a badge of honour
round here, can't call yourself a rider without it,
so I look down silently and don't tell her
that the horse jumps out, that she needs to lean forwards,
and she sits tight and tackles the fence again.
...

But it wasn't getting here that mattered, it was movement and westering.
John Steinbeck, The Red Pony
Kiss me in this Ford Fiesta with the English number-plates,
its nose dipping into hedgerows where the wet grass
streaks off like a coat of vermicelli,
sprinkling its loosened seeds around the mud-flaps, and the gush
of brackish inexperience, everything that holds its breath to let us pass,
smacks up from the gutters of the road. As we
become a boomerang in orbit
sent back over what precluded ground, what world
that beckons and resists us.
Kiss me as the hills enlarge and shrink, for I
do not believe you when you say,
on these pin bends I seem to handle with a ham fist,
going both too quickly and too slowly
to ever get my finger on the pulse
of skies that steal their colours from abstraction,
or towns where the weather is a citizen, still,
and life a battle with its precepts, one long
surrender to its loans. No (though spark me up a cigarette,
and let faint smoke rings burgeon through my hair; your kiss
is like a gateway onto childhood
as the car lifts off the tummy-bumps, remember them
on the Clough and Comber roads?),
you will almost never nearly not convince me, quite,
that some small part of you (wheee! that reconfiguring of innards)
that part of you conceives of this as home.
The radio picks up the shipping forecasts - high winds
for Doolin Bay - and salt shapes language on the oyster of your tongue.
...

If we do not mass produce products, we vie with one another
in the difficult, exquisite and useless art of dressing fleas
Octavio Paz
Mr and Mrs Flea are dressed up
and ready for the celebrations.
He sports a neatly tailored waistcoat,
she silver-bordered asymmetric skirts.

They are the talk and toast of the party.

Sad to say, however,
a budding fashionista in the audience
catches sight of their duds,
and next year on the catwalks of Milan and London
the look is brazenly passed off
as the signature of the couture line
at the brand new House of Insect,
which in due course signs a cracking deal
with a high street shop.

I don't need to say the Fleas never see a penny,
and neither does their tailor,
who, five months out of the punishing year,
wrecks his eyes
and racks sleep-heavy brains
in the decking out of his favourite customers.

Though for him it was never about the money -
the fleas, dearest, could hardly pay,
and the tailor is in any case not a tailor
but a farmer from the provinces
going about satisfaction in his own, yes,
his own unfathomable way
where the sun drops, faithless, to the littoral,
dead dark balling its fists against the light.

See him there, readied at the chipboard table.
He takes a swig of liquor.
See, dearest, how the inconsistent stars glitter and claw.
...

Can you hear it there
whispering anonymously, just
over the next hill
pebbles cast
like isolated truths, the wet
sand holding them in place
sea-shaped,
their water-weathered edges

and the far-flung ocean like a dark room
to be entered through the sun's
watery glaze
bare-bodied, with mouths
full of nothingness, of the salt-
scoured elementals of the tongue

We were only scavengers
amongst those sparkling particulars caught
in the wintry light
a gull's
effervescent dive, the indescribable smell
of wind-whipped skin
and though we
managed to forget the slow wade back again
through the heaving skirts
of marram grass
feet stumbling
on its ground-hooks, arms wheeling
like an acrobat's against the moon

when the dune-dust gathered round our torsos
something like believing
slipped away

some unremarkable honesty
that made us see each other as through glass,
that made us blink to see ourselves there.
...

The emperor's goods are sinking through the water.
Rich pickings - the quality of the regal larder
is such even the toothiest of the water monsters
does not let its yellow eye from the ball for long enough
to be drawn to the muddle of flailing limbs - there,
and there, again! - seeking to interrupt the meal
with death's slow fanfare. Death, as ever,

comes roving out in search of witnesses.
The emperor is willing to sacrifice a toe, even
an elbow, so long as there be more to it than this:
more to the felling of an empire than the sharp cries
of his wailing mother, face splattered with kohl,
her hair a mess; than the ricocheting passage
of a skiff over tranquil waters. In the shallows,

rough women loot his mother's vanity case,
left bobbing by the shore in her distress,
and the sea creatures murmur in the moon-pale flicker,
watching the slow descent of gorgeousness -
item, a jewel-crusted dagger; item, a ceremonial dress -
spiralling through the ever-darkening layers.
The prince Yoshitsune is dead; also dead,

his mother, who sculled on the sea's cold mirror
till she could scull no more. When, later,
Bashō comes here, he will write of the prince's death
in cumbersome prose, his eye drawn rather
to the impregnability of the water's surface,
the octopuses swirling in their wooden traps.
On the sea bed, Yohsitsune's jaw snaps open,

then closed. His carcass is a resting place
for minnows caught in the harum-scarum of war.
...

It's said the Muses judged the contest -
that they were pleased by Apollo's superior craft.
His ability to lift the pelt in a single stroke
was greatly lauded. ‘See how beautiful the work,
clean as the average man would skin an orange!'
they remarked among themselves. ‘Not even a wound
disturbs his fearful symmetry.' Meanwhile Marsyas

lay on, his life force startlingly undiminished,
limbs gesturing in disbelieving contract
with the world. ‘This for a stupid pipe,' he roared,
for Marsyas, Ovid relates, possessed the gift
of consciousness: ‘for this they cleave me from myself!'
But nobody beyond the forest heard his cries,
and Marsyas's body, reverting now to the status

of a brute, dumb animal, went on in hopeful
disbelieving, heart thumping away in the blue furnace
of itself, lungs fighting leafy crusts (an organ,
so anatomists tell us, so wonderfully porous
it survives in the transfer from a body to another body),
tears stinging his flittered cheeks, for a full
half turning of the sundial before darkness came

upon him, and he curled into position like a dog.
...