Vanitas

This is the poem just published in The Interpreter's House (45). I mention its origin below.

You would think it started with a photograph, black and white
probably, certainly dog-eared by now; but it didn’t. So I am able
to tell this as I wish; there was just a sharp sense of a wheel turned,
a ratchet cogged, a being reeled in, a floundering in shallows.

It was me and Phil Lee – mid 60s- on Friar’s Point where I stand now, watching a metallic sea scraping a thin white scar along the beach.
I think The Small Faces were Number One but it could have been
The Kinks. It would have been Summer, it would have been sunny;

perhaps a lazy Sunday afternoon or maybe just lazing on a sunny afternoon depending on which was Top of the Pops. An old man stopped – I say “old”
but he was probably much younger than I am now (everyone looked old
then being dressed since birth like smaller versions of their parents).

He was old enough though – looked like a talking skull. We would have been cutting edge – probably late Mod; just before hippy got me, electrical engineering got Phil. He said, “I was born here lads but haven’t been
back for years. I loved this place, it’s all that kept me going sometimes,

this view. Look at the wild flowers – on the wane now but they’ll be back
come Spring. It’s good to be here; nowhere else holds a candle to it”.
I think we said “fab” but that sounds as if it was already retro then so maybe we didn’t. Perhaps we shuffled, embarrassed, searched for a reason

to walk but held by the Grammar School boy politeness to elders,
we stayed, pinioned, tethered to the story, which did involve a lot
of bad luck, though I am short on detail as I didn’t really listen
and don’t want to make it up now. Anyway, the old man stopped,

looked at his watch, wandered off somewhere as we did – and ,
I guess, that, at most, we would have said “weird” or something like that,
(not “awesome” which is much too contemporary for my taste). Whatever, it would have been something which meant, you are not of the same universe,

what knowledge can you bring us; our life is immament, process and eternal;
we will carry forever this Sunday, the endless possibility of being fifteen
(or sixteen), the truth of back-combed hair, the inevitability of checked hipsters, the ability to sing obscure soul music, turning the heads of the

black boys on the fairground rides. (I think the old man would have liked Frank Sinatra, or maybe Matt Monroe if he thought himself cool – it is difficult to tell on such short acquaintance). Now I’m standing on the exact spot where it all happened forty plus years ago; dragging on this

memory like it was the last cigarette in the world - hoping for epiphany to cross the blood brain barrier; looking for someone to tell that I’m leaving for the last time . My Spanish cigarettes warn of “una muerte lenta y dolorosa”. Standing alone on Friar’s point, I can’t imagine any other kind.

Good news on the poetry front.

Heard today that I just missed the shortlist for the Cinnamon Press first collection competition. Very pleased to have got so far in the process and will have work published in the Cinnamon Press anthology Feeding The Cat which comes out in September 2011. One poem is The East Yorkshire Crematorium which won the Envoi Prize last year and the other will be Trisagion which is a triptych based on a backpacking month in Greece two years ago. The poems are largely about the island of Naxos where I stayed in Naxos City for a week.