Geography

Geography.


We arrived at night.
The village wood smoke carried salt-air salvage
Like the breath of the past.
When we awoke we were amazed to find a glossy, grey sea had sprung up overnight.
The morning was spent catching crabs on a hand line
Made from a length of twine and a palm-smooth piece of driftwood.
The rusting promontary of the pier smelled of iron,
Littered with lobster pots and broken buoys.
We crawled down underneath to shelter from the rain
And balanced on the concrete joists in the dark, airy region;
Two little girls with salt-tangle hair peered back at us from between the barnacles.

In the afternoon we were charged with fetching fresh spring water -
How shocking to find it gushing forth limpid and cool from under some corrugated iron
While mute brown sheep looked on.
We stole through a gate on to a brand new shore,
Made a treasure of a million shards of pottery worn smooth by the tide
And with bulging pockets were wafted towards a great discovery:
A dried waterfall pool, subtly hewn out of the hillside
By a century's constant falling.
Now cluttered with the debris of its arrested flow
Were a childhood's worth of gloves and gears, comics and toy cars.

That evening it seemed we had discovered a fairy kingdom.
As we soaked in the peaty bath we decided our eerie, muffled hollow
Would forever be a magnet for the world's chaotic trivia of socks and rings and notes
Gone astray.
Even now I wonder what became of those childish amulets we held close
While lost in peat-scented dreams.