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Jim Caruth

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Dingle

We nurse another hangover and sun ourselves
on the warm rocks like fat seals, looking out
across a sea that holds up a wall of blue sky.
And I'm talking, saying how they once believed
that was where it ended, the horizon's rim
where the ocean tumbled over into nothing.

Last night again, we drank too much as we watched
a wafer moon dissolve on dark tongues of cloud.
Standing on the shore, the sand under our feet
hard as corrugated iron, we heard waves break open
in the dark, as ghosts and half-remembered faces
were spinning around our heads like stars released.

You were lost in the darkness but I knew I could reach
out my hand and touch you, find an anchorage.
For out there winds were changing course, stirring
the sea to storms. Out there, fishermen were listening
to the crying of whales and ploughing the deep water
above wrecks, above the graves of wide-eyed sailors.

Can you feel it - the ocean's persistent fidelity.
How it holds up the earth. Can you feel it -
in this moment, all that's left holding up you and me.
The red tip of your cigarette arced like a distant comet,
I heard the suck of your breath, the slow exhaling,
and the spent sea filling each crevice and cave.

Jim Caruth is a man in a suit who writes poems. Born in Belfast, lived for a short time in Cape Town before settling in Sheffield. Has had work published in various journals including Staple, The North and Dreamcatcher and on the web in the US.

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