Burial poem, for my ex
In the end you have a ship burial.
I lay out your body in a longboat’s prow
and fill the hull with everything you’ll need.
x
You are laid to rest on a bed of clean socks.
Ibuprofen, dental floss, dishwasher tablets:
all the things required in the next life.
x
Archaeologists will find your bicycle pump
and think it’s the hilt of a viking broadsword,
a dark lump misshapen by soil and time.
x
I lay down your speakers and your charity
shop CDs, your cigarettes and sunglasses.
I line up beer bottles like canopic jars.
x
Next I give you heirlooms. Your boat grave
is full of gravy boats, a great aunt’s hideous
porcelains, your baby shoes, your school notes.
x
I tuck grey hairs among the grave goods;
grant you old age, another girlfriend, a child, a cat.
I gift you hobbies: woodworking, cookery books.
x
As flames lap at the longship’s sides — waves of fire
slapping at the keel, heat running over your skin —
you are freed from one life, released to the next.
x
Walking Across the Atlantic
After Billy Collins
You’ve told me the story of your mum and dad:
how he walked from Cumbria to Scarborough,
to ask your mum to marry him. With plodding
devotion, he printed his love letter in mud. Yes,
she said. He’s yet to make the journey back.
I have no such story to tell our made-up child.
x
No. I didn’t cross the Atlantic. After you left,
I never slipped off my shoes and threw myself
from the end of the pier: bracing for cold,
then testing my weight on the buoyant swell.
It would have taken half a year at least,
those icy, faltering footsteps towards
x
America. Otherwise, I could have told our child
how the waves were soft against my soles.
How the crests copied shapes from home:
greyblue dales, whitecombed fells. Water
deep and desolate as peatland. I left no footprints.
Sea forgets, I’d say, where land remembers.
x
Bladderwrack
Day on day I’d harvest it
from the black rock,
never knowing it had
a name. I loved instead
its feeling on my skin —
wet and ridged and thick,
those fistfuls of sea-cysts, each
pustule glossy as an olive,
webbed like frogs’ toes into
one slick mass, which belched
when pinched. I pressed
the warts of salt-air
in my fingers and they
named themselves:
x
plerp brop plip slarp
***
some have also called it:
popweed bladderwrack
sea oak rock wrack
black tang sea grape
rockweed
and seawrack
and maybe others:
welt-bush bubble-shrub
boil-tang blister-leaf
plerp-weed brop-wrack
slarp-grape plip-oak
salt-names bursting
x
from between human lips