White islands glide over battered granite hills;
and, near sky, top floors, empty, unfinished,
without balustrades, architecturally complex.
Show-through and mirrorings of light splashed
on to the soft blue of the atmosphere,
setting off dark blues of harbour and bay.
Water’s high. It’s after five, boats returning,
all predominantly white; and white seagulls,
apparently wandering, butterflies.
Black back
on the roof of Salubrious House… the pine glossy
in our garden.
Two herring gulls floating
on the water of the bay. Three gulls now.
A single boat, two people in it, south-east
of Smeaton’s lighthouse, going north, only
now becoming visible, but fully seen
in the room’s mirror. A single boat goes south,
perhaps to round the pier into harbour,
in both window and glass; in the mirror;
and my memory.
More gulls butterflying.
Wind makes
the palm shudder. Boats drift at their tethers.
Tourists walk past in the picture’s lower half –
I know they’re there -- looking with envious anger
at the houses. A half a million pounds’.
More than the loss of all one’s limbs and eyes.
More than a death.
A boat is gleaned into
the mirror’s picture, oared, northerly towards
a marker buoy; a small boat, but this one’s
under power, overhauls it -- it seems
some pleasantries exchange – and then departs
into the bay’s core and the further ocean,
though, at that size, it’ll stay close by land.
A larger boat, masted, wooden cabin,
comes in from the direction of Godrevy.
A tiny outboard seems to pull aside;
and the fat boat is only in the mirror,
a speedboat following it, but also only
in the mirror.
As water enters the first
of Smeaton’s arches, almost filled by
sea-pushed sand, many tourist boats come out,
kayaks and pedalos and larger craft,
in an unheard buzz, the stinging insects
of evening, a lugger, out from the harbour
and round the pier then north, smoothly, rapidly,
its hue the wide wings, with satiate assurance,
of a gull waddling dully on a house roof.
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UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton
42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover
Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4
wfuk.org.uk/blog
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