for Howard Nemerov

The Pier

It is fog, and the pier goes
into it, a perspective
of slippery grey boards
and iron handrails converging
on a vanished vanishing point.

Ten years old, I stride
between the rain-caped fishermen
who sling their weighted lug-worms out
into the slack, horizonless
waters of what was once the bay.

There is grey and there is hungry
yellow: the stinking oilskins,
the sardonic yawns
of the herring-gulls, and
the palms of my aging hands.

The sea is wordless;
the fishers' buckets are empty.
Only the invisible dredgers
give voice; only the channel pilots
tell echoes from answers.

What the Butler Saw

The sepia-edged bedroom
flickers into apocalyptic dark,
and the after-image of girls,
stopped in mid-gesture, fades fast.
Punch and Judy bicker across the bay.

One was about to dismantle
her nested coif, the other
to tug the bow of her drawers.
There was never more than this,
of course. The cameraman packed up.

And the girls climbed back
into their black skirts.
A little boy in a sailor suit
conducts the Pier Pavilion Orchestra
for a large cash prize.

After the next penny, I may
ignore the fat bodices
and contemplate the washbowl,
the paisley bedspread, and the lank
aspidistra, which do not move.

While the Orchestra ignores
the little boy's baton and Punch
bludgeons the Baby, an old man
crouches in the bristling sandhills,
his raincoat over his lap.

Bursting with ginger-pop,
children and nursemaids roll
and tunnel under the wiry grass.
A female cadaver is pinned open
in Tussaud's Waxworks Show.

Within the red flaps nestles
the Miracle of a Virgin Birth:
a twin inside a twin. The old man
spills himself, with care,
into The Evening News.

History is made, and Justice
done: Punch hangs the Hangman,
the twin within the twin
awakes and speaks,
the boy is given his prize.

The Tide Turns

The stone bosom and belly
of the clouds loom in baroque
indifference on the sill of the world
over the Irish Sea. Contained
and content, I walk the shore.

The mud is patterned
with the raw blue sores of jellyfish,
the severed tails of wrack,
and the shit-like coils of worm-casts.
The sea has left for good.

Two miles shoreward, the pier's end
is a part of the horizon
with the frieze of grey hotels.
I turn from the zig-zagged track
of footprints. This is my mark.

Here is my space. Become
a strumpet's fool, I listen
to the breathing of the sky,
the febrile pulsing of a gull's wing,
a sighing of the mud-banks' dust.

England is past and lost.
Towards the West a dredger moves,
its iron hull tall as a castle wall.
The shallow waters reach for me—
a small boy with his bucket and his spade.