from Sea Fishing
Sundowner
Here sun is the fraying edge of the cloud-wadding.
On his other island, facing the seafront bar
it’s wide and coppery, different angle of vision
but the same old trick, hiding the abrasions
behind the dazzle. Vodka-and-tonic time.
He sets out five minutes earlier from his room,
gets his breath beside the pineapple-palm
and again outside the chemists. He has to be there,
one sip into the evening, at his table,
before the last red sliver disappears
like an old penny dropped into no-return
through the slot of a payphone: click,
tapped-out numbers, pause, the muted ringing
that halts, her unanswerable voice.
*
Or maybe he never thinks about phoning home.
He’s got the Atlantic, making its usual sounds,
reprimand, brush aside; the tide mounting
the side of the planet, fresh from the Antarctic.
Each day is a fish hauled out of the ocean,
landed on the boards of the motorboat.
He thinks the tumour is in some membraned place
invisible to dissection, where his heart
taps out a message for him, but he no longer
wants to decode it.
He thinks each day he manages not to speak
is another saved from the spot where the strong current
pulls the swimmer out slantwise from the beach,
spins him under the bellowing waves and drops him.
Page(s) 7
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The