Calm, Before the Storm?
I was asked about the term Regis seas from yesterday's poem, in our Friday morning poetry review group. I had taken the poem along as my poem to be reviewed, along with Carol Ann Duffy's Finding the Words from her excellent book Rapture.
I was asked when the poem was written, to which I replied: well obviously it must have been after 2005 when Rapture was released because it is referenced in the poem. Then I explained that I had spent several out-of-season months in Lyme Regis, while I was working along the coast at Charmouth.
However, on reflection, I realise that was in 2003-4. The poem then must have its roots in an earlier period. This is one of the problems caused by keeping my poems alive. The poem posted yesterday was modified yesterday, and may well have future modifications, if it ever comes to light again.
The question about Regis seas also got me talking about sitting in my first-floor hotel window, right on the promenade, looking out to a big sea. I was listening to David Hockney on the radio, talking about how the painter could capture way more than the photographer.
I said to myself, but David, I as a writer, can capture even more, for I can write about what is above me, what is below me, what is behind me, and what the noise of the motor-bike make me feel, as he leaves town for the night.
No surprise then that I put this into my poem:
The Waves Roll Over and Over
The waves roll over and over
Rolling across the curve of the shoreline
Their stereophonic splashes wash over, wash over
Silently the sodium lights glaze the ripples
Incidentally highlighting the ebb, the flow
All the while buoys and marker lights bobble, flicker
Seen through the open, broken bathroom door
This after Yentob on Freud, on the radio
Only pretending to understand
Wanting to remember this time
Wanting to describe the space
Describe the feeling
Sodium at the seafront
At midnight
No other sounds
Sea moving, salt-air flowing
Earlier, Hockney saying that painting
Painting is the real thing
A photograph could not capture the scene
You know what, he is almost right
But behind me is the sink
Down below the window
A solitary moment, a stranger passing
Neither captured, by flashbulb, nor by paintbrush
Both unable to synthesise all of the view
But with these thought out words
Written down, beside the corroded
Glass cracked single glazed window
With a cream windowsill on the inside
Outside a sky-blue, mottled, blemished paint
I can look out into the blackness
Describe that now there is no horizon
Only a two-dimensional black space
A completely starless night sky
How would the painter work?
Without depth or perspective
How would the photographer touch?
The thousand miles of nothingness
Between here and the next continent
Or remember the background sounds
Beach-bound pebbles crashing
Like a sack of marbles
Or the roar
Of the last motorbike
As he serenades
Then leaves
The shoreline esplanade
Maybe it is for the last time
