Issue 2: August 2003

Martyn Crucefix | Katy Evans-Bush | Alan Jenkins | Tim Turnbull | Julian Turner

ALAN JENKINS

Galatea

When you left, and I was thinner-skinned
I stayed in bed for weeks and cried and cried ...
(I scrunched alone through broken bottles, claws,
The bleached brittle crusts of starfish, crab —
A salt-rich tide of little deaths — and I could hear,
In that click-click of pebbles when the sea withdraws
Her high heels on the pavement.) That was the end of us ...

Back down "on business", I take a bus
Past the shut-down shop-fronts and collapsing pier
To the beach, the little café where I wrote
(So long ago!) "through wood and weeds, washed up
Like bottles, torn shoes and a plastic cup
We walked without a word, and parted", and I almost choke
On the smells of vinegar, and steam, and smoke —

Outside, my eyes go on stinging in the wind,
The salt sea-wind that blurs the shingle-shelves below
Where pebbles tumble over themselves in the sigh
And hiss of foam, where on hot days we used to lie
Like sea-creatures on the sea-bed, their ultra-sound
Antennae groping, or the fish we saw
Laid glistening on the fishmonger's slab

But could not afford to eat; where I hear again
The liquid clicking that I came to know
As the bubble that welled up, burst and re-formed
Under her busy fingers. Is she waiting, with
Her shock of blond hair and black velvet coat
On the sandy, scrubby, gorse-dotted bit of ground
Where I got her to agree the thing had died

And she ran off, crying, in the rain —
Staring as she used to when she lay awake
And listened to that squat colossus, watched it rake
Our bedroom with its klieg-light cyclops eye —
Saying over and over, Don't you know how it hurt,
Don't you know how ...? A giant claw
Gouged up the sea-floor, dug up the drowned;

A generator throbbed like a migraine
As, in the harbour, tugs and dredgers swarmed ...
Or at the Metropole in her black corduroy skirt,
The creature I loved, who is now half-myth,
Reading Persuasion over tea, twice-married,
Her smile subdued, benign? No, she is spindrift, carried
On the wind, the voice of one ill wind or another

That blows me and my leaking boat no good —
Whenever you go out, in your little craft of wood,
Your little craft of words, it will be me you hear,
It will be me reminding you of how you scorned your mother
And all women who loved you (God knows why),
It will be me reminding you that you will die,
It will be me reminding you of everything you fear.

Available from Amazon.co.uk:

A Short History of Snakes: New and Collected Poems (Grove Press, 2001)
The Little Black Book (Cargo Press, 2001)
The Drift (Chatto & Windus, 2000)
Harm (Chatto & Windus, 1994)
In the Hot House (Chatto & Windus, 1988)