pdf download - Westerly Magazine

PETER KIRKPATRICKTear HereThe bay is a spirit-level; a bubblehorizoned between the heads, where you cometo find your own horizon, the sea-levelwithin: where those thin sheets of wateryawn up the bay's rubbish, feeling your ownmade innocent as seashells.Ah, but notso fast. The sand is thickly rugged in weedlittered with the ghost armour of sea-urchinsand dead birds sprawled like dishevelled stars;sea-slugs as big as livers are rolled doughilyby the tide: there's a dying going on,deeper than you can say, speechless.It's a slow poison, this field of sea,just like that person you try most to believe in,whose thoughts return the scuttled love wordsthat struggled to find harbour in you here:they break with the remorseful shallow tidethat gives back a human waste of bent cansand plastic bags refIlled with algae.Tear here:the perforations of your footfallsare the only lines you truly understand,marking off the water's wrinkled gladwrapfrom the stale place you inhabit in your words.And where do you imagine here can be?76WESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989