Rachel Blake
Death at West Wittering
It is terrible to go down to the beach at sunset with death in your mind:
The sea growing aloof — receding friendlessly,
The wave-rippled expanse of strand emptied,
The salt and tacky breeze of nightfall chilling you,
Cold gusts of it rustling spasmodically
The brittle grasses in the dragging bog
Of dry coarse sand the tide never reaches.
Terrible because the idea stops the moving air,
Hallucinating, fixating, in a shrunk world
The soughingsea, the stabbing wind and the glass bottle
With the chipped green metal top, and the blob of cotton-wool
And the plate-like white tablets marked in segments.
Terrible because the act is a total cutting-off
From blood springing in the body, seaweed unfurling,
All motion, undulation, change and flow;
From imperceptible ripening and gradual waning;
Seeks, perhaps with a kind of lust, even, the arrested movement,
The cold flesh that stays where the finger pushes it,
Rigid limbs floating discoloured on the waves.
. . . . .
And now the moving picture is a still.
Page(s) 121
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