VOCATION
––as if you can
suspend
your living body
in the cove's glassine
light––in tide's
slack;
––500 million years old,
metamorphosed schist,
Man of War gneiss––
a poem-sequence reef
of riffed human
utterances,
vowel-syllabled,
incisor-sharp––
treacherous outcrops
of lyric poem intensities
––stillborn;
––a chough's cry
echoes between
headlands, lilt-pierces,
––unseen
––red hooked beak,
scarlet feet, slender-
fingered wing tips
––a blood clot
snags in soft fog-
folded cerebrum,
––deep brain-
stem swells,
a weakness,
like a rock's
fissure
––a skein
of carotid
artery smears
the film image
––cut-down
consciousness,
the plummet
a moment,
fall-
ing
––to have
kissed
death
intimately,
is a gift;
past-present-future
time's netsuke––
––end-beginning,
time's illusion,
––a croupier's
sleight of hand
––molecules,
planets––
it is a game you play,
no twitch-tell––
the lightness of being,
an asthenia
––year-days,
day-years,
you stared
into death's
diamond
––you scratch with it now
on the mind's
dazed lens
bruised long hours,
the first smooth
ripple, like a
slow-rolled
marble of
gravitational
alchemy
––above,
day-moon's
anaemic
thin-lipped smile
understated,
unremarked,
like the approach
of a new poem
after a long run
of slack low tides
a fractional
shift––
––since humanity
began, how many
have watched
the first wavelet
of a tide's
turn across a
flat glass sea?
––the nearest rock pool's
mirror shimmers––
––a hairsbreadth
more water––
do limpets anticipate
the ocean's rise––
grip, like you do,
ever tighter?
we all need
an anchor,
a daily rhythm––
unnatural slivers of clock-time
divide an indivisible
present, reflecting
to infinity––
work-time, broken, in this blurring
of seasons, like a clockmaker
with a watch's steel innards
laid out on an oil-smeared cloth––
what time is it?
what hour?
the week slithers
like the lizard into the shaded rock crevice
days, years––
lengthening,
shortening
––a shifting sequence
of gradated light angles––
your upright body,
a gnomon in the midday sun,
hours unmarked
on seaweed-stranded sand,
––your new identity,
a sundial
with no shadow;
in daylight, you impose
your illusion of time,
––at night, there is
no forward sequence,
––you are lost as your dream-
memories drift into
quicksand––
––on the smokey horizon,
three ships slide by,
their cigar-smudges
silent poems
––blurred ellipses
between stillborn words
from a dream
lashed onto dawn's
miraged waking
––human-minnow time
the tide's
turn––
––it was the smallest
movement of his lips,
eyes––
a lifetime ago––
slow time––
you climb,
sit on the cliffs,
follow the sun's
fall, moon's
rise––
all day
beguiled by
shifting light-colour
––see the distance
you have covered?
the pilot of marriage's bi-plane
flies on and on––instruments
dead, sky-sea reflecting
infinitely––
like a monk,
the serpentine turner
bends his head
at his vocation,
as the humming lathe
spins, as the
earth revolves,
tilts away from the sun––
safety boots ashen
in the grey dust,
as he glances up––
clear amber eyes,
sea-freedomed––
––gone now,
first and last
serpentine turner,
centuries-old stone hut
carved out of cliff,
knuckled into rock,
part of it––
empty,
––miss you––
useless words
––you look through the window
out the other side
to the sea,
across the sunlit dust motes,
ghost-memories
of polished bowls, vases,
the solidity of father-to-son
lathe and hand tools
no longer an unbreakable chain
not subject to human time's
dissolution,
––but the sea is ageless,
merciless, stows no clues
––as if the stone-turner
turned the world
on his lathe,
held it together
––secrets, traces––
you had to earn the right
to a rare fiery serpentine piece;
to be gifted––
––you have learnt
the value of human time
the hard way;
does he still hold you
in your mind's eye
as you hold him?
does memory's scent
hang in the air––
forever present?
––you turn your poems,
unfinished, broken,
secreted away,
––lifelong apprentice;
time dissolves as you write
––do you understand now?
––it is all one poem,
this double vision,
an unexpected
gift––
Alison Smith is a poet and a writer. She recently completed a Creative Writing MA at the University of Lincoln and is managing editor for The Lincoln Review. She is working on her first poetry collection. She is the editor of, and contributor to The Big Walk: It Takes a Decade (Lincoln: University of Lincoln, Justice Arts and Migration Network, Lincoln Institute for Advanced Studies, 2020), an Associate Artist for the Justice Arts and Migration Network, and one of the student poet-contributors to the film poems "5 Voices" shown at "The Wings of Technology Festival," 2020 and to "Poetic Conversations," responses to "I Am a Refugee, But . . ." in 2019–2020.