John Gladwell
Separations
Standing, looking out to where the sea beckons,
has lost its colour, dried seaweed on a beach
of memory, where dreams are dredged, dissected,
by pools of water, cold and still and black, each
pebble, shell, taking hold as you then say. ‘Look,
the tide is in. Each time we come down here the
tide is in.’ And I’m not surprised. All through those
years waves have lapped against the soles of our feet,
each breath of wind a gap between a hawk hovering,
a whiff of hunger and pain and these rows of
beach huts closed for the Winter, their corrugated
doors padlocked against a gap in this mist and
a bird, its head gone, a tangle of feathers
and bone as we, trying to calculate the cost
of forgetting, now touch each wave, as though giving
permission for this tide and each breath we take
to stop, as touching my arm you then say. ‘Look.
Someone is waving.’ And you wave back. Thinking
you might know them. But nothing has changed. Just this
sea retreating into a fold of land here where
a tree slips and this land is ripped, a home for
all confusion, an old fusion that once brought
us scrabbling down onto this beach, just out of
reach of a tale once told, of a land crumbling
and me fumbling, towards a place where law and
lore were one. Time reversed, a mirror cracked,
a distortion, an almost letting go.
Page(s) 70
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