Tôpher Mills
Hill End, Llangennith
The sea and dunes are shrouded
surrounded by thick fog,
running barefoot, full pelt,
across the visual wilderness
of sand below and all above ground
a smothering of damp grey blindness.
Saltiness clouding his face,
his speed bringing elation,
he pounds up the dune’s
steep, sand-slip avalanche,
thigh muscles tightening
with an ache of breathlessness.
Lungs gasp at the sparse grass summit
with visibility nil, he can only survey
his beach bum’s feelings. Surely
he was born for sea and sand’s caress.
In the car, out of the fleecey rain,
preparing for the long drive back,
he watches the surf widows
sat in their boyfriends’
chunky, four-wheel drives,
reading, chatting, chewing apples,
waiting for the surf to go down,
their men to come home.
Just before he leaves
a couple comes back
and he hesitates and watches
the girl peel off her wetsuit
with a deliciously erotic difficulty.
Memories flood over him
of when they came here
year after suntanned year,
surfed till they were blue with the cold.
How as a child he’d sat on that wall
and decided to be a writer.
He was amazed that this pilgrimage,
the first in fifteen years,
should be rewarded by so little
in the people or the place having changed.
The seagulls noisily surf the atmosphere
as his Maxi bumps up the old track’s
deep ruts, its clutch slipping badly.
He is thinking of a wetsuit.
Page(s) 35
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