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Robert Seatter

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Travelling to the Fish Orchards

We all want the stories:
why that church was built there, why that island
abandoned - the banana plants and palm trees making
half the arc of a path through the botanical garden
past the glass houses.

We want the names too, the facts, the dates:
his cruel silhouette against a red-gold wall, the sleeve
all flowers, his name that sounds like aubergine.
Then the map of the family, the years in a line -
like railway stations with someone always waiting, hat in hand
on the platform, who will say at the breakfast table later
That was where we went ... then there.

But there are times when we take off our glasses,
enjoy myopia: lights blur, the bay is a roaring mouth,
the delicate tower a slim golden finger,
gargoyles' lips are wide brass trumpets,
a flagpole the long, twisted horn of a unicorn
vanishing down an alley.

Or we stumble on words and make strange monsters
out of translation - like the time I grew peaches not fishes
out of the milk green canals of an island.
The men traipsed their footsteps thick with water
through the undergrowth, waited under trees
in abandoned valleys for the golden scales to shine.

 

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