Cally Conan-Davies: The World is Simple

The World is Simple

soft, loose curlicues of sea palm

torn from rock during the storm

lucent sea lettuce rimming

glass-clear pools

compassed by yellow sponges

sharpened by barnacles

reacting to spasmodic surges

in spumy yellow circles

 

these watery hollows hold

shell-grit in skeletal cavities

a plastic lure spat out by the sea

and fishing-line caught on a mussel bed

re-made into a wreath of weed

 

clouds in the mirror ripple a vulture shadow

for whom sculpin quivers could possibly mean

food but as the tide pulls in the black wings

cut away along the cliff having apprehended

that little fish are quick with intent and nobody’s fool

 

such force of salt on the coralline algaed rocks

a drink of water would go down well

but the sea is dry

I watch the fog bank dead on the horizon

with hands wet from wringing out love

under the weather, given

the run of the ocean, knee deep in

how it never stops

 

 

 

 

Star Sestina

 

Sometimes you hear a story like this.

Some lives seem to hang by a star

like the single one in the afternoon sky,

the loveliest one that aligns with your face

when your mother calls, and you go in the gate

left open between the house and the flowers.

 

I come from women who know what flowers

will stand the salt. And it comes down to this:

summers of sea-thrift beyond the gate

and slender sandwort, a five-petalled star,

and fog and butterflies licking your face

when you lie all day looking up at the sky.

 

There is no limit to the sky

my grandmother sang, sewing a flower

on a gift tea-towel with a look on her face,

alike even then, even in this:

that the angel should sit, not the Christmas star,

at the top of the gum tree by the gate.

 

A windbreak of driftwood becomes my gate

to a skeleton beach. I hear the whole sky

empty its birds by a wasted sea star.

Night is a field of a different flower.

Grandmother’s headstone, a prayer. Beside this,

the moon looks down with a quartered face.

 

I turn the pages of her face.

She sits on a pony, she swings on a gate,

this schoolgirl, this nurse, this bride, and this

new mother, bombs grinding the London sky.

Five times, her broken water would flower.

One of her boys went out like a star.

 

Her mind drew its margins from every star

and suddenly I am face-to-face,

pressed in the book, with a bone dry flower.

Here is her heart. I touch its gate

and heaven springs open, taking up the sky

for she comes of women who make much of this—

 

this is no end, no end to the sky

or the wild flower by the swinging gate

this is your star, and this is your face

                 Cally Conan-Davies