(This is an excerpt from my long poem 'The Sea is Rising,' comprised of 5 parts. This is part 4.)
Stetson! You who were with
me in the ships at Mylae
Yes we watched the ships
sink,
But I, mein schwester,
Was busy burning the forests
and blasting the soil with lime.
I was busy writing the book
-no
don’t close the book, you know that should you close it, the final page will
emerge in the twilight of a forest fire, telling of painted motorcyclists
burning dust amid their hell-fated screeches!-
Aye, but the book, mon frère,
mon semblabe,
The trees birthed the book,
And now, the trees are ash,
Or embers rake in cosy little
homes
Or logs in cabins for
lumberjacks
To head out and labour of a
cold morning.
There will not even be a
wasteland, just an empty space in the suns orbit.
Oh dear!
I can see the diamonds
tumbling out the window,
Oh dear, and the gold, too,
As the ice rumbles and
groans,
As it awakens bleary eyed,
desperate to know
Who had the audacity to
commit such an atrocity
And who first saw the problem
And what did anyone do
Oh, the diamonds and gold
tumbles into the cracks,
The jewellery box scatters
across these floors,
Once such polished expensive
wood, the finest, you know, imported,
The only other place to use
it was the royal palace
But the ice has that now…it
was of no use to the ice,
The ice cared nothing for the
rambling gardens or ornate sculptures.
We skulk the surface rolling shit little cigs,
what-we-doin,
Waitin’ fer the ice to crack? Fer our jobs back?
We leave what little coin we have tappin’ upon the
table
Drag in the husks of filthy gulls for suppers
brawls fer the great bloated corpses of whales when
they come
bobbing and bouncing under the ice. We’ve skinned the
cats n’ dogs an’ all.
Money’s more of a werd than a thing nowadays eh
Up above the close shore, I see somethin’glitterin’
an’ glistenin’ outta window,
Something pretty, something deadly expensive, something
exhaustively useless.
The floor boards are warped
and sodden, soaking banknotes pasted to the floor…
The ice rises from its
invasion of distant fjords, it breaks clean and free from its moorings in
death-held harbours where fishermen try and murmur
The names of the yolde gohds,
try and summon something somewhere somehow.
On the Sea Burial:
A sea burial, is nothing new.
I’m sure your Grandpas &
Grandmas
Your Aunts & Uncles were
all treated to the phenomenon;
But never like this, this
unforeseeable, un-unseeable daymare.
Men haul bodies all day long
into the shallow basin of ferry decks,
From 7 til 5, with a lunch
break.
Just passing corpses, one to
the other to the other to- Bam! The wooden deck.
Tacked up in one of the
ship-container offices, a sign:
EMPLOYEES MUST WEAR FACE MASKS AND GLOVES AT ALL TIMES
The ground’s too sodden, or
too arid, too full, too frozen; too many bodies;
We can’t make things grow let
alone put the dead down in.
At the end of the day’s work,
when the labourers, mostly prisoners and refugees, are lined up and filed into
their buses,
I watch the boats roam out
unto their final visit, to add to the forest of the dead
To allow their final baptism;
hell,
The sea’s rising anyway, this
is everyone’s destiny…
Still, I can’t help imagining
The wrapped bodies, bloated,
Inedible, and, besides,
uneaten,
As sharks and whales alike
are already dark, swollen carcasses themselves,
Tickled along by the current
To their final destination,
The shrinking shore.
Merely a dot viewed from the
broken coast, but all know the power;
A great swarm, miles square,
of plastic disintegrating into micro pieces in the sun;
Of fishing nets lost in
ancient trawls, now catching terrified prey for no mans dinner;
Of black and rotting shards
of wood, splintering and sodden;
Of corpses of all manner of
life, gaseous and hideous, entwined and starved;
“like an isocline of death.”
Here the exiles wait out
their last moments; on the surface,
A horizon of everlasting
shite, of stinking, gull-walked, dead dead dead waste.
Underneath, like shattered
and unattuned icebergs, the trash continues, into the dark,
frozen in the
light-splattered waters. Their corpses add to the mass,
like a cloud; visible,
effectual, but unsolid. We have made ourselves useless islands.
A boat returns from the dot,
minutes before sundown, ice crystallized on the mens’ beards;
I cannot see their
expressions, but after leaving a squealing exile amidst the “salt sepulchre,”
I doubt that they are
beaming.
I detect a slight stench, and
cannot decide if it’s imaginary,
from the vortex of waste over
yonder,
or the grass and birds legs I
have stewing over the fire.
Over here, they’ve found
something!
Somethint aynshunt aynshunt
aynshunt
Not like all the seabird
skulls an’ smashed tellies we been avin’,
There’s not no switches or
wires to this ‘un
Look at ‘im loom outta the
ground,
The great funnel over there,
the round orbic
Surface deeply and familiarly
warm-
Has this machine been turned
on?
With what switches and pulses
Could such an aynshunt device
animate itself.
I hope it’s not fuels of
crumbly black or drip-drip black or gushing choking black.
We all know how the world
felt when
We did that before. When we did that
In the glory days, our mouth
full of it all.
Not now there’s no birds an’
bees
Barely worms an’ trees… Just
us, really, Somehow,
Loping about, bred,
dumbfucked,
Twisted with all the old
stupidities.
When I look up I see grey and
I need not taste the rain to
know every day is another step-