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Julia Casterton

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Finisterre

As we are at the end of the world
everything here is gauged in microseconds,
the split life or death chances of Formula One.
Even the rainbows behave differently

as they would in a place where nobody came by accident.
Like Reepacheep, we are all here because we chose to be,
so the waves of light drenched in particles of water
don’t recede, endlessly, as they do in the books,

but begin and end their polychrome arts
here on the rocks. Look, you can touch the source of colour,
the moment-place where sunlight offers flowers to her handmaidens
then throws them into the air on a furled carpet of purple

while underneath, a fisherman rows out in a velvet boat,
no surface tension between himself and the water.
Here, there is nothing else but this: nothing to pull us
forward, nothing back. The fishermen’s knots

that held the nets in place have worked loose
and we are floating in a sea that was always waiting to receive us,
the fathomless ocean that holds neither fathers nor remorse,
here at the last landfall, where rainbows behave differently.

 


Julia Casterton lives in London where she teaches for the City Lit, Open University and University of North London. She has published three small collections of poetry and Creative Writing: A Practical Guide (Macmillan 1986, 1998).

 

Page(s) 90-91

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