The Castaway
  Sleepless
I keep sleep in my pocket,
insomnia a sea-urchin language
and the nights strung together dried like chilies,
the red, the black, the ceaseless, the unbearable,
the darkness of chilie wombs rattling with stars.
But every night
a whale in the bay
spits at the moon.
Though it does not exist
how quickly I put my serenade together
for our low-tide rendezvous.
Look at me, I say to the no one there.
One day these bones will be silver in the sea-holly.
But today I darken, I darken,
my skin a caste-marked congregation in a chancel of salt.
The town astronomers
are camped upon the dune
measuring Mars as it rides over Somerset.
Maybe I should throw my spear at them
or serve rainwater in an oystershell.
Such a current.
I call it El Generalissimo -
for only the current can say
where the disappeared people have gone. I fear lightning, jellyfish, the uncomprehending mind, call
centres, ticks, the data protection act, search parties,
autopsy, sandfleas, journalism, tourists, tiger sharks,
whirlpools, translation, the storm ten miles offshore whose
ziggurat is built from one billion tons of rain, rain bricks,
imperial staterooms of rain with rain's imperial family
waving from their balcony overhead.
Was it for this I bartered
my breath? But at dawn a footprint,
and in twilight a crab army
circumnavigates the camp.
  Meanwhile, I'm refining
my religion.
    To hell
with the sutras of sand;
every day that gospel changes.
My latest god is the driftwood god and I am driftwood's dizziest disciple.
See his altars with their pilot-lights ablaze upon the tide.
My mermaid I made of marram
the storm stole, she lifted, green
grass angel over the point,
not an outline left of her
or a trace of the garden I trod her in the chalk,
and after weeks waiting not a word to her
guardian of the one who ascended
without sin or sign, my
wife from the midden,
my wife in mid air.
One thing I know.
The cormorant is always
black. But not blacker
than the blacknesses the ocean will become:
and even the cormorant's eye will be black that an hour ago
was the Peruvian god of Mars as it scorched the sky.
  Destiny, they say,
is all: our pre-natal
navigation. So the poet sets out
over the shelves of Spezia
and there's my mother's madcap on the shore
sewing his shipwreck into a shroud.
  Every day
the sea smells stronger on my skin.
&nsbp; At last I am utterly clean,
anointed with crow feathers, battery
acid, the fair's cinnamon doughnuts,
sulphur in the dune-rift and fire
from the fumeroles on the seabed.
How my blood rings against salt's armour.
    So,
    which sea tonight?
The waif?
    The wolf?
Yes.
Traeth yr Afon low tide:
  the beach a looted exchequer;
  barbarians streaming away.
  I start again.
Now the current is dark and all its candles
pinched, its voices vanished like so many
voices that failed at midnight, and the sea's library
in darkness, in its greatest darkness, every book of it
and every page fused to blackness, every word and signature
translated into the language of the dark.
  Patience he played
  and patience he showed.
I'll just show him patience, that no one there.
Here's the wayfarer tree upon the shore -
as if my father had left his diamonds and spades
  all over the beach.
    August
I'm spending under a hunter's moon.
  Tides come in like brickdust,
and all the sprockled moths mad in the wall rocket.
  Sometimes I lie on the seabed
  to look at the sun.
And sometimes I think drowning's
  a white door
  behind a white
  door where a fire
  burns on a dark
    isthmus.
    First
there is an island
    then
there is no island
    then
there is.
    Or:
a sleeper in the ocean
who rises and
      shakes himself
out of his limestone trance
      every eleven hours.
  In my own dream
    I was a glass
statue on the sand with the sea
suspicious behind the mist.
  And in my glass belly
beat the last
    Adonis of the dunes
the last thought I would ever have,
  the last creature I could dare to be.
  I stood,
a statue on a shell-dust plinth,
the invisible ocean's foam
to my femurs, and the butterfly
tormented in the glass web
  of my veins.
  They told me not to swim
at night, but the cormorant is a great cartographer
and I follow the compass in his heart.
  Yet who knows these roads like me?
I put out my hand and the darkness pulls me in
and I join the army of the invisibles
whose breath is black, whose blood is black
and whose wine is the colour of the waters under the waters.
      They are waiting for me
      in the amnesiac room:
they are waiting for me to open my black mouth
and tell them all I have learned of the collision of midnights,
of the sea's unseen catastrophes.
  My sentry
is the mullein in its greatcoat.
And strange - the sea going out and going
out and going beyond me somehow,
so in places of the garden where I floated
  - nose and ears stoppered by the waves' pollen -
lie the bureaucracies of mud
  and a conger family
  fletched like school railings.
Television people come to ask
what I eat. Only oysters
oiled with samphire, I say:
or fennel's green shuttlecocks;
maybe kedgeree of seabass seared on a basket of kale.
(More truthfully scroungings from the wheelie at the Seagull Room).
Now I'm planning my own series after the soaps.
    But the current insists.
    Over the shoulder of the world it comes.
    And I who was sealed
    am a honeycomb.
A long way out.
    Oh never so far.
Over my head the butterfly is moving
away from the citadel and its arcades.
  Not that way, I want to shout,
that way is twenty miles without an orchid mouth.
But there it goes, as if it knew what I do not -
  black through my squint
and trembling
  like a sunspot.
Yes, I bartered my breath
for this. Here the sea's anaerobic
clerks tend their screens, every
molecule awarded its place,
never ending their trials at the terminals.
And the sea drinks with me bringing cup after cup.
What a night we have together rolling in one another's arms.
But drowning's the second
Impermissible dream. Each wave is a flume
and a fugue, high pressure August swell lifting me light
as the whipweed till each wave is a fog of dirty gold
where the swimmers are smiling with their cuttle teeth
and then each wave is a child at my ankle and then a mother to my mouth.
For her salt milk will make me strong as a starfish,
as dead men's ropes and I'm a belly bursting like a hot Dominican plum.
Here's the wine I wanted most and was never allowed.
· First published in PN Review