Love on a Rock
Who could tell them now – out in the world,
its plethorae of arc-lights, halogens, discos —
those lighthouse children with listening eyes,
now the last tin cup, plate and fork
are stowed in the last canvas bag under
a fo’c‘sle and rowed with their owner
to the supply port, gold watch and severance.
But you’d know them then in utility brown-
and-cream rooms, wiser in their generations
than world-children; at jonquil Formica tables,
sucked HB stubs at poise to take down
wireless PO boxes, or describe collections
and hobbies to comics; devouring a quarter’s worth —
in a morning — of Dandys and Beanos and Judys
since the weather last faired; or dwelling
on all missing lightkeeping men …
know them playing ecksy-oseys in winter,
hopscotching the one slab of cement
between storm door and fairweather jetty:
and know by their manners when bible-people
came with flasks in baskets and Old-Testament
crayoning books, or hikers with tripods
to put the rock in their textbooks and maps.
You might see them still, if you’re careful
on city-hall or tower-block stairways, left
foot tiptoed on an absent stiletto from years
navigating anti-clockwise tight spiral stairs:
or find them when everyone’s gone,
rocking against the emulsioned wall
in the dark of a seventh-floor office
and the sound that you hear isn’t them
but the thinness of baby-seals’ weeping
or the contralto with auburn-grey wisps
chanting the bright stormy sea as she folds
the cold grey sheet down and Trinity-
House-issue blankets, tells them never
to fret. Or their lilting along to the small-
gansied man with pipe-grime under
his left index-nail rippling a hornpipe’s
slow triplets on a Breton concertina.
And you’ll know them in truth for children
of the rocks, for they’ll have preset
the Xerox’s counter right up to the thousand,
lid-up and nothing on the glass, eyelids
numb on the margin of sleep as the phasings
of light take them home to the beam-room again.
Winner, Strokestown International Poetry Competition, 2006
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Other Poems
Read more about Cahal Dallat’s poetry.
