The Sea Shall Not Have Them



Some slide guitar in the background here. There is much rain around today, a glorious grit-splashing deluge from clouds which push the sun to non-existence, a darkness which drives us all under cover to hum and talk of things we think are important. Someone immune to the soaking, whistles as they walk a path we cannot see somewhere in the distance. We are happy maybe but would not show it to anyone for fear of not fitting in. here are numbers and a blonde woman at a desk, thinking and writing words that she thinks come from God through the ether to this world. A pause to reword something has distracted her, or maybe some sound from outside, perhaps that whistle we heard but it stops here like a knock on the door. Maybe she is angry but it is impossible to tell from this blank face, for the story she tells has taken all her expression until she cannot cry at things she thinks are so bad in her life. There is the ringing note of a hammer dropped on a rail bent in the heat, out in the desert sun; it rings in the distance, clear and pure, like a tolling for some small death out there in the shadeless sweep of America. If she looked up, she might see the tiny movement of the man swinging that hammer, a black shadow with no detail, standing against the far blue, wiping the sweat from his forehead, thinking ahead to an ice-cold beer, set up on the bar in the lights and air conditioning of his small home town.

Poetry comes to her again, great gobs of meaning, broken up and remade like a butterfly comes from a caterpillar, juiced and re-formed inside its leathery cases hanging under the leaves of that scratchy tree in the yard. Here is a forest, a gang of straight-up trees, branchless into the heights and then spreading to make a cool, green cavity down here amongst the scaffold of their trunks. She thinks there might be a bear somewhere close, broken into verticals by the trees, split further by shadow and moisture, until it remains just a thought, the idea of a bear that might have been the one that broke into the car the other day. It lumbers from one side of her mind to the other and escapes before meeting the paper, to end its existence through that ringing hammer.

More whistling now! I am back in this rain, no sun and the long view of the years in front of me. Writing this should be some proof that things can change but sometimes it just makes we feel like I am trying to batter down a wall that has no thickness because its thickness never ends; I could be in a trench trying to dig myself out rather than trying to knock down the wall. And thinking of how other people are worse off just makes me think that it is not far to being that worse off and I go home to make the most of what I have there. Rain does not matter, sun does not matter; just being in this safety is enough to make me happy. I am back under the veranda of the Cricket pavilion at school, caught in the rain with others from my year, waiting for it to lessen enough to run back to the common room but not really being bothered. The red-haired girl, forever my better by miles, says things I cannot understand but still I comment and sometimes scare myself that I sound like I know what I am talking about. I thought she might have been Catholic; she talks about religion so much, but now I know the real depth of belief and this is just interest in the subject, a range so breathtaking that my later mentors pale at her feet. Maybe I wanted to kiss her but such a thought is not real; an impossibility created by the gaps in my knowledge and her twelve-out-of-tens for English. She knows everything it seems, pronouncements on politics, religion and all in between. And then there is her friend, the other pillar of that sparkling year, a girl who knows she does not like science but still works so hard that she shames all us non-arty types with perfect scores (for no mathematician would dare go beyond 100%). She knows poems of trees; she knows that bear and she knows how the trees grow and why the bear survives in the trees. She asks the stupid questions with no shame and we snigger, but thank her silently for clearing up the things we ourselves do not understand. And in those questions she has made a better world, improved the technology and found solutions to everything. Give her the time and platform to put it all to us and we will live forever; we will be at the stars like gods.

My life is in that tree up there, well all that I can remember anyway; those first meaningful thoughts started when it was planted. It is dangerous to think of it all, and yet I keep going back to it. How to make things better? It always comes down to going back and doing things differently but that would undo all that is good. I don’t want to lose what I have seen, the sweep of the rice fields, the dead under the trees of Trunyan, decaying into the scent of the forest to come back in the fertile plains of Indian Ocean Islands, the Twin-Towers rising from the dusty village that October so many years ago.

And then there is the girl whose name I forget, who I bored by telling her my entire school timetable when all she wanted to do was walk along the beach and listen to the sea. We went to the theatre that evening, quiet in the dark for something cool and funny and I loved her then. It rained as we came back to the beach, and I said nothing then, just a quick goodbye at the door and a sigh with the tide that the next day would bring in yacht to wreck it on the rocks we played on, scattering the Stanley Knife my dad still has and the distress flare that we wanted to set off but instead fired into the dunes. And the porpoises came right up to us, dizzy scurries of black, shiny things in that shifting surf. No amount of risky excitement can have the meaning of all that I have seen because it is me that has seen it. Wishing for differences is futile but doesn’t stop it happening. All poetry is wishing for differences, Saint Margaret talking to Joan of Arc, shining and colourful, obviously divine in her masculine robes, designed to make you do the right thing but she will not come to me; any voices I hear will be mad an incoherent, a sweep of irrelevant instructions, not from the trees but between my ears, telling me to jump in the river, to run in front of traffic and I will not listen to them, rational to my sighing end, wishing for what I have not got and being thankful for what I have.