by Alice Oswald
When trees take over an island and say so all at once
some in pigeon some in pollen with a coniferous hiss
and run to the shore shouting for more light
and the sun drops its soft coverlet over their heads
and owls and hawks and long-beaked sea-crows
flash to and fro
like spirits of sight whose work is on the water
where the massless mind undulates the intervening air
shading it blue and thinking
I wish I was there
or there
A goddess or fog-shape in full wedding dress
sulks in that loneliness what a winter creature
whose lover loathes the everlasting clouds of her
and sits in tears staring at the pleasure-crinkled sea
but she as if a dash of hope
discoloured her sight stands waiting
the way a spider when it wishes to travel
simply lets out a silken
aerial
electrostatically alert through every hair
to the least shift of the ionosphere
at last it lifts on tiptoe and lovely to behold
like a bare twig it begins to blow
wherever the wind will take it but the wind
is the most distracted messenger I know
Whereupon the water turned in its cloak
and shook itself into flames and burnt itself into fur
and tore itself into flesh and told everything
and instantly shrank into polythene
and withered and bloomed and resolved to be less faltering
and failed
and became a jellyfish a mere weakness of water
a morsel of ice a glamour of oil
and became a fish-smell and then a rotting seal
and then an old mottled man full of mood-swings
forgetting his name and twisting his hands
denying and distorting and thinking ill of everything
he snapped himself into sticks and burst into leaves
which fell back down again as water
blue-green and black-shine with white lining
and blinked himself into thousands of self-seeing eyes
like a piece of writhing paper in five seconds of fire
destroying its light with its
light
And so the sun brought measurement to everything
all but the sea frightened of its own stupidity
and on every cliffside luminous lilies
made their escape through stones
whose swinging stems
were merely the lowest ruffling hems of the passing of spring
and above them flying in verse
in time with
the wind
Two sisters in shock
one couldn’t speak one couldn’t stop
she knocked on the bedroom window
sister
hello
what with tutting and whistling
she shoved her way in through the door
well sister if they cut out your tongue
you’ll have to thread this needle and stitch me the facts
and as she stitched and stitched those sordid facts
broke through her feathered smile and became a beak
As when the moon shines through tent walls
making black-and-white films of the woods
so that the sleepers seem to float through trees
so those two sisters
out through their back-lit flesh they fly
into the blue of amnesia
snapping at insects and can’t think why
Terrified of insects of noon of sunlight
when the sea dilates to let more green in
and the damaged undermost in all its clefts can be seen
when swallows free themselves of their sorrows
and seagulls hang themselves on invisible armatures
and only a few tiny almost magical flashes of light
fall in the form of rain and
stop
those lovers lurk in their indoors wondering
can he hear us now that poet has he finished
his poem about us what kind of a sting in the ending
will he sing of the husband if he is in fact
on his way here knowing by now the craggy out-jut
of that shallow place where the seals bob about like footballs
and did you hear along the shore that chorus of trees
with seaweed hung from their twigs like wept-in tissue
being moved by what a heartfelt sigh the wind is
and have you noticed the way the radius of water
maintains itself in proportion to its circles
as if each raindrip made a momentary calculation
and when it stops there are ruled flat lines
running from one island metrically to another
How does it start the sea has endless beginnings
There is a harbour where an old sea-god sometimes surfaces
two cliffs keep out the wind you need no anchor
the water in fascinated horror holds your boat
at the far end a thin-leaved olive casts a kind of evening over a cave
which is water’s house where it leads its double life
there are four stone bowls and four stone jars
and the bees of their own accord leave honey there
salt-shapes hang from the roof like giant looms
where the tide weaves leathery sea-nets
be amazed by that colour it is the mind’s inmost madness
but the sea itself has no character just this horrible thirst
goes on creeping over the stones and shrinking away
The sea she said and who could ever drain it dry
has so much purple in its caves the wind at dusk
incriminates the waves
and certain fish conceal it in their shells
at ear-pressure depth
where the shimmer of headache dwells
and the brain goes
dark
purple
who could offend the sea there is so much water
we might as well waste this ever-replenished
fairy-tale stuff don’t flinch she said
I want you to walk this carpet
please oh please
you must be so so
footsore after your ten-year war you surely
deserve a little something if you
take off your shoes the bare floor will be so cold so
filthily infectious you should step down safely
here
That man is doomed that very second
the swelling blood-shade shows through his skin
even as he bashfully sets his foot down saying
after all I’m not nobody maybe I deserve a little
brighter something than my allotted brightness
no superstition has ever hurt an honest man perhaps
after my bath in my towel I can walk it
again
Inside his lifted foot in its falling pause
Fate feeds on this weakness and the same
massive simplicity cuts through his throat
as drips and sways in all these
tide
filled
caves
the same iridescent swiftness and the same
uncertain certainty either brimming or rippled
or swelling over of hollowing water
as one thought leads to another if you stand
here on these boulders with your back to the earth
you can see the whole story of the weather
the way the wind brings one shadow after another
but another one always sweeps up behind
and no-one can decipher this lucid short-lived
chorus of waves it is too odd and even
as if trying to remember some perfect prehistoric
pattern of spirals it is too factual too counter-factual
too copper-blue too irregular-metrical
listen
Let me tell you what the sea does
to those who live by it first it shrinks then it
hardens and simplifies and half-buries us
and sometimes you find us shivering in museums
with tilted feet so that all we can do is lie flat
our colourful suffering faces watered away
we who threw fish-lines into these waves
and steadied our weight in mastless longboats
and breathed in and out the very winds that wrecked us
And there are herons there are sea-ravens
whose wingspan is a whole awning
they could lift a man’s flesh off its framework
and cormorants like eroded crows
and angled ospreys and harpies
all kinds of long-beaked hungers
peer from the trees and any minute now
with smashing of wings and probing of steel-grey pins
they’ll come for these eyes oh horrible
flightless
light
I’ve always loved the way when night happens
the blood is drawn off is sucked and soaked upwards
out of the cliff-flowers the way they worn out
surrender their colours and close and then the sky
suffers their insights all the shades of mauve green blue
move edgelessly from west to east the cold
comes ghostly out of holes and the earth it’s strange
as soon as she shuts her sky-lids her hindsights open
and you can see right out through her blindness
as far as the ancient stars still making their precise points
still exactly visible and then not exactly
well there was and there was not a drowned woman
still visible underwater crossing a field
there she walks nothing can shift that moment
lodged in her chest when she was kidnapped
and her outline stayed there forever but she
now with no character only this salty bitterness
became a slave she who had rich parents
began to smell of anger sinking towards unendurable laughter
which overruns its circle like the sea itself
on whose blind glare
a boat appears full of rat-eyed sailors
squinting from watching too much sea-film
Image after image it never ends
it has the texture of plough but with no harvest
but every so often a flower of light floats past
and one of them slept with her which is a woman’s weakness
we must keep it she said hidden under eyelids
put lampshades on this eagerness if we meet
at the fountain for example washing our clothes or drinking
but after a while he grew bored of this patience
he came to her door with necklaces
she had a needle in her hand she looked up sharp
and her mind slipped like snow off a leaf
but the gods know everything they sent a virus
fluttering after the ship and seven days later
she dropped like a dead bird into the bilge
four sailors had to swing her over the side and the water
with all its claws and eaters closed over her
the splash became a series of dots and
under that sound the green sea turned
grey
Transparent wisps of things with eye-like organs
sink to the seabed in shells of extraordinary beauty
and at sunset the smells float out orange
and settle on the flowers’ tongues while sea-whips
thrash thrash the water for a living
nobody cares whether there is weeping or oozing
or the flavour of dead flesh fills the evening
and when the wind shifts you can hear a man
shouting for help
cursing his wounded foot but
nobody answers
Only night-birds eating insects
whirring and dialling in the small hours
expressing no emotion only existence
always laughing and screaming the same fact
stacked on every twig not every sound
is a voice not every breath is a self
but anything
knocked by a sudden blow
has the same unspecified shrillness oh I
feel like a glued fly giving up and standing up and
time and again stuck in the same pain if only
my foot could move my thought
and think of a cure but my thoughts can’t
lift their wings and every struggle
tangles me lower I wish I was
there or
there
Misfortune I wish I could meet you
underwater in your deep green room
and flannel your bloodshot eyes
and brush your dead hair
they say there is a flash of mercy
concealed in your face-folds
if only a person has time to swim down
and find it
there are soft chairs no windows
no noise except the self-closing stone door
which I opened once
and found myself in a chamber of options
a little sea-cleft where the salmon drift
and turn into humans
but Fate is not Fortune
I was not fated to find you there
only the converging walls
the tilted
floor
And once a fisherman poking among the mackerel
pulled out a human head whose head
tell me muse about this floating nobody
the one who would have drowned but a river
coming looking for him with swerves
and trailing beard-hair how secretive it is
when water moves through the sea
keeping its muddiness intact and fish commuters
hurry under him as if motioning him in
this river touched his hand who is it
honourable river-god is it you he said
o cold tap cold mouth pick up this message o help me
I come to you upside-down with empty suckers
crawling along the sea surface on my knees
stripped of everything even gravity have mercy
Tell me muse about this ancient passer-by
who found himself adrift in infinite space
with all the planets flying in loops around him
like listless gods
all kinds of light and unlight he witnessed
until his eye-metal rusted away
and now there is no going back no edge no law
no horizon or harbour-wall or rubble breakwater
can keep out this formless from his sightless
nevertheless the grey sea-voice lapping at his skull
even through closed teeth goes on whispering
There was once a stubborn man
searching the earth for the guillemot that speaks
who came at last to the breakneck cliffs and paused
a sleek bird studied him as if to say
you must be that southerner
fated to die of fright if I speak
and a woman once let go of her posture
and shoved herself in a barrel onto the waves
it felt so right to feel her thoughts
hitting her skull
one person has the character of dust
another has an arrow for a soul
but their stories all end
somewhere
in the sea
Then we went down to the sea to our black boat
first we dragged the boat into the lively water
and set
up mast and sails and drove the sheep on board
then climbed in ourselves depressed crying lukewarm tears
and our hostess who is a goddess long-haired inhuman
but her language is human except when she sings
those bitter grief-songs sent a fair wind
like a friend following a few steps behind
and we busied about securing the ship’s tackle
and sat in our places while the wind and the pilot steered us out
all that day the sails at full-stretch drew us over the water
until the sun sank and the roads let slip their shadows
then our boat reached the outer edge of the sea
that feeling of water in its own world moving underneath us
where the blind people live lost under a cloth of fog
and the sun can never burn through it to find them
not when it floats up into space
not when it turns and sinks into the earth
but night always stretches a dark membrane over those people
And there I saw the crumpled criminal face of someone
in the fog of her body not knowing what she did
she murdered her husband obscene night
first the gods found out then everyone else
but she her whole soul strangled with horrors
knelt in the bathroom scrubbing and scrubbing