After the Gargoyle - Day 9 - Sara Dowse

And what do you say to the lady

who waits on the shore and ponders

the ships that glide in the harbour

towards her, and away.

Away to the gargoyle that fed her, reared her,

then spat her out on the ocean,

a shell to be flipped up here.

Washed away:

the grime of her cities,

the rails she has ridden,

the birds she has heard. 

And you would have said that the turns

she has taken, or not taken,

the about-flips, the flustered hesitations,

must have been the wrong ones,

could have been dead ends.

She sees a son’s face in the waters,

Byronic curls, down-soft cheeks.

He’s lost in that ocean, somewhere in the waves.

Washed away too the nurturers, the husbanders,

the ready, comfortable, beery jokes

slipping from their lips. 

Their wit knows nothing

of dark tunnels,

their mouths curl, so innocent they, of what lies so deep,

so deep beneath the waves.

There is the bright world, sunshine glancing, a memory of a ferris wheel,

smells of old wood and urine, a sour, oceanic tang.

And the boats, bobbing on the water, streaked with rainbow slicks,

lilacs, puces, ochres. 

They said they don’t mix, oil with water,

and yet how they try, she thinks.