Night Sail
I dreamt of sailing Spray, grandfather Herrick’s
pilot cutter, from its berth in an old black-and-white
on the kitchen wall, past the docks, the cranes and derricks,
not to some sluggish oil-rainbowed bight
with pier and prom, in the lee of Gosport or Goring,
not to the wild side of the Isle of Wight
or even a Winslow Homer Nassau mooring
but a secluded cove, where we’d ride at gentle anchor. . .
When I woke, you were still snoring
your smoker’s snore; I saw the cliff-face of a super-tanker
and, tied up to starboard, someone’s super-yacht,
flying the flag of Panama, or Casablanca —
this was before the crash, not
that the crash would have bothered him —
motionless behind its oil-rich haze, its hot
sides gleaming and all its tackle trim;
a super-model, fresh from her shoot on the Ile Ste. Marguerite,
her neat mound cupped in a scrap of scrim,
supine on a sun-deck, inviting him eat —
A drink first maybe? You choose. . .
The air pulsed with the steady thresh and thrum, the beat
of her super-engines, super-screws,
and suddenly someone had drawn a veil, a pall
of grape-dark clouds over the plaque for La Pérouse.
~~~~
Storm-light on the marina, the harbour-wall,
and on the sea beyond. The steady thresh and thrum.
The little pastel boulevards, the palms and all
the quayside bustle and the prosperous hum
of restaurants in that unfashionable resort, the vines and olive groves
inland — a sunburst showed me how far I had come
from London, S.E.1 to the purples, mauves
and deep blacks of that bay, the opalescent blues
and blue-greens of a thousand inlets, creeks and coves
— but Spray was gone with grandfather Herrick and his muse
and all that I’d held dear was up for sale,
and it wasn’t looking good, for me or La Pérouse.
~~~~
You were still snoring. I saw a faded, flapping rust-red sail
and under it, your head propped on sacks of rice
in the bows of a caïque. . . Here I draw a veil,
a veil of tears and old malt over thinking twice
before coming with you across the wine-dark sea to Zuwara,
for I had drunk the milk of paradise,
I did not keep that appointment in Samarra,
I could only lie awake and listen for your whimpers to subside
to snores or read to you from John Grisham, John O’Hara
or John Donne; I did not see the sewer where they died,
the bloated corpses floating downriver, the villages laid waste,
the heaps of blackened limbs on each roadside;
how the lives of others were degraded and debased
in camps and market squares, in bare-bulbed basement rooms
at police headquarters, how the nameless and effaced
lingered on the air in airless catacombs;
how the first bones to surface from mass graves
were children’s bones, how gas from punctured wombs
alerted those who clawed at rubble, or how a man behaves
who finds his wife and daughter, headless, in the street,
how a man sinks to his knees and moans and raves. . .
~~~~
I would have woken you, inviting you to eat,
if I had sailed with you on that caïque
you took from — where? Not the Ile Ste. Marguerite,
not the Isle of Wight — but the flesh was weak,
or I was, and I made some excuse. The old fear,
of falling short, of being found out, of the yellow streak
that runs through me like the streak on the ‘beautiful fusilier,’
caesiao teres, on the yellowtail, or on the gilthead bream,
sparus aurata, that noses through its still-clear
blue-green glaze — further glazed by steam —
on the ancient Persian or Syrian ceramic tile
you picked up in Beirut from a Karim or an Ibrahim
and lugged back for me, that I might sit in style,
in state, under the bathroom shelf
where it sits; that I might look at it and smile
as I think of its weight in your grip, of your contempt for pelf
and perfidy, of your straight dealing and your guts
and have to get a grip on myself
when I recall how you forgave my Ifs and Buts
and brought this back for me, thinking of the bream we ate
in that Lebanese place I sit in till it shuts.
~~~~
I sit in and pick at the grilled bream on my plate
and drink the fierce north African rosé, carafe
after carafe, on the evening of our ‘date,’
year in year out, imagining the chat, the jokes, the chaff
that could not keep those rockets from their target, from the screen-
door of the house you slept in that last night; remembering the gaffe
I made the night we met, and the packed shebeen
we met in, crushed up close on benches, and the reek of kif,
of Silk Cut and Gitanes, and all the nights between;
remembering how you almost came to grief
so many times, with your ‘I guess they don’t make men
like they used to,’ not in a sudden squall or on a reef
like La Pérouse, but ‘in the field,’ and how again and again
you’d make light of the risks you took,
‘on the ground,’ whether Tamil or Chechen
or Taliban, and how you read me like an open book
when I made my excuses and instead set off —
not on a dhow packed with spices for the souk,
not on a fishing smack out of Roscoff
with Tristan Corbière, bound for St. Peter Port,
and not on Spray, but on the Eurostar to Paris, putain, boff.
~~~~
Then south to that unfashionable resort
where I ate a bream and drank a carafe of the local gris,