We clamber about volcanic ash cones that dried and cooled millions of years ago.
Grassed-over, grazed by sheep, adopted by a national charity.
We sit outside with coffee, look south as the ruined church rebuilds itself
in red out of chemicals drifting in on the wind from a war somewhere.
I rub and scratch the grit from my hair. Thunder bugs are everywhere,
even dropping on to this poem as it’s being written.
We interrupt our languages with images as and when the moment comes.
Like when you look up and there’s a girl walking the cliffs with a crown of thrift.
And the thunderbugs go on flying, landing, one misses my page and lands in a puddle
from the storm an hour ago, water that’s as deep to the bug as the sea is to me.
I reach down and flick it from the surface of the water where it was wriggling on its back.
I don’t see where it lands.
Thankfully,
a whole city of birds saves my poem from the usual egocentricity and thoughtlessness, among other weird sounds it makes.
Look at them out there on the water hundreds of feet below.
Forty thousand, sixty thousand. Who’s counting? Somebody is.
Bless us, the priest says. And bless, he says again, the woman in the Fiat 5 who drives the hills and hairpins much too fast. And bless anyone coming the other way.
It’s clean at last, says the verger, referring to the aisle where the wedding was held on a rainy day.
And I wish people wouldn’t bring their pets in here.
Why did you call my novel haunting? says the supplicant in a side pew
as the church goes on rebuilding itself around them all.
At least I remember it, says the ghost of the nun who couldn’t read
but who drowned somewhere near here in thirteen-sixty-four.
The breeze is cool on my bare arms, says the irreverent postman,
delivering Bibles in Latin by the sackload.
Bless me especially, says the priest, as he falls through a trap door
and lands with a thud in the crypt.
Rain clouds again, says the pilgrim, still some way off.
He’ll be distracted by a bar where bats are perpetually angry
and the women who serve the beer are calmly naked.
The bar smells unmistakeably of wet dog.
Meanwhile
the sun shines through the cracks of the crypt door but the priest is unconscious
and misses it all.
A plane – such a rare thing these days – rumbles through the sky, heading across there
towards the land that used to be called Norway I’d imagine
and past thought and reindeer and the memory of you
bringing two mugs of coffee outside.
On the hillside you struggle to balance for just a second
and I call out Don’t spill them, never having been one to help, especially when
it’s time for rabbits to emerge blinking into the light to hop around the soup of the day
down at the Old School Cafe
that’s thickening by the hour.
It’s good to get away for a week or two if you can, says
the verger, smoking by the open trap door.
The supplicant watches ash drop through the gap.
The verger is oblivious, goes on
You know, top up your tan, go to the local dance, nibble a vol-au-vent.
A girl with a tray of the damn things pushes the church door open
with her knee, anxious to finish her shift. The supplicant calls out to her
Did you read my novel? What did you think?
I didn’t but I saw the film that was on at the open-air cinema last week.
The supplicant says what is that language you’re speaking?
She says language kittiwake, dialect razorbill.
The priest, waking up, his mind pootling by the cliffs of memory like a diving boat on a lazy summer morning when the divers know there will never be enough oxygen on their backs.
It’s a bright sky now, says the priest, shouting at the end of so much silence.
And the girl on the cliff top pulls the strap of her black tee-shirt off her shoulder, smiles and takes a selfie with the sea now just a fraction of the image, which is just as well
as the gannets cackle on the stack that broke off a hundred thousand years ago.
A group of walkers walk past listening to a man they have paid to lecture them
on geology as the girl switches angles and lowers the other strap of her black-tee shirt off her shoulder for selfie number two.
The priest is jabbering on about a delayed flight.
To where no one knows or cares.
The verger remembers that day because the website was down and the check-in machines were all out of order but the church still had to pay a fine of three thousand hail marys even though everyone in the party was Anglican.
A woman flies past on crutches calling out to her elderly neighbour
The man she married had no military bearing for pity’s sake and
obviously hadn’t a clue how to knot his tie.
Anyway I shall go no further.
And she lands with a bump, but overshoots the cliff
and is never seen again.
A man, perhaps the last of the chain-smokers, decides to fish
off the rocks. Two kayaks go past. Their slowly revolving paddles upset the nesting birds but the kayakers don’t care about that any more than the girl with the crown of thrift is bothered about picking the local flora.
The fog-horn, silenced decades ago for its own safety, it’s red, or rather a reddy-brown if you must know, blares out a hymn without a name.
A boy from the eighties with a boom-box (remember them, awful things, says the nun?)
slams his fist into the speakers, declaring I thought there would be more to see.
Still, says the girl in the black tee-shirt, I’ll set up a tripod quite near the edge.
You never know what midnight will bring.
The priest, not really recovering to any great extent, on his broken back in the crypt
complains It’s like when they say they will call you back, they never do.
And the prophet, pumping up the wheels of his chariot of fire with a foot-pump,
says one day we’ll all be dead and won’t be able to see any of this.
Ah well, for now I can feel the heat of the sun on my neck and the cool breeze off the sea.
And the kittiwakes sing kittiwake and the thunderbugs head east along with the fire-flies,
at least those who escape the sweep of the swallows and house martins. And the verger,
free from the church at last, notes down Yellow Hammer on his Spot A Bird leaflet. Outraged, the Yellow Wagtail screams at him I’m a Yellow Wagtail and you’re lucky I let you within fifty metres.
This is not nonsense, not at all, says the nun, as she strips off her habit and raises her arms to the sky. How many of us can say we can let a poem, a day, a life run, without the need to impress?
Self-absorbed, a young couple lay perilously close to the old volcanic neck that drops into the magma chamber and fall asleep in the afternoon sun.
Write, I tell everyone who would be a writer. Write. Let the poem that begins as one thing become another. If you want, of course. It’s not my job to tell anyone what to do.
And where’s the map. No, not that one. I don’t want to sail the Mediterranean or the Baltic. Yes, that one Ordnance Survey No. 67,
which, incidentally, is the number on the side of the sheep, in blue, that sits by our fence
and stares us down every day as we set out to walk the two and a half miles to the village for breakfast.
I never want to be in your head again, says the poem, exhilarated, released.
Worry not, says my ghost. You’re done with.
Bob Mee poetry and more 