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,
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