Yarrow Rock. The clouds kept pushing at the sky like great whisked egg-whites, turning inward and about, licks of smoke that coiled the blue air, discreet majestic ghost ships crossing serenely from the south, jettisoning cannon-tails from their bows or whirling uncertain, sleeping wakes from each mushrooming stern. This soft, grey, clouded deer and its ambling, antlered cavalcade made charging commotion seem effortless. The hundred silent ports above opened to a thousand noiseless swans, each imposing greater calibre on its buoyed forebear. One of them seemed to glance down on a poached field of sloping yarrow, where factions of purple lithe grew in marshy mounds into budding, festive thistles. Here they lay, or rather close to, wondering, aching from the simplicity of never knowing enough. They had forgotten their troubles, and the sky courted them of this reminder, and nothing beside themselves. They counted the only moth in the summer-dry marsh a welcome surprise, and then their eyes turned upward again. The sky seemed to stop in places, if you took one slowing to mean another speeding, where in others it still ran stubborn as a flood with vapour. Banks of blue satin and folds of white fur mixed before their separate palaces traded kingdoms, engaged and wed as a spoken wish might, carrying the nations beneath them further than either could go unaided. Anonymous puffs bore this season’s latest greeting, going duly out for water. And that being, in order to welcome all, spoke: “What goes there, kind?” And they answered by waving, all four arms warming. They were deaf to the wind of change, but seeing it still, a plan began to formulate. How could it not? White mice and pink mankind, such as they were, made burrows of their tomorrows, dreaming of a place that cannot be seen or imitated, cannot be returned to or taken back again, and is often quickly buried under the relentless blades that grow over entreaty’s stony rock. A harpy stood on this, her high perched outcrop home built from yesterday’s fishermen, and cried a mourning loss, her lustrous blue hair all fallen out and spreading the sea with their parting blood. “All they wanted was to find me, their one and last, but I must not be, I must not”, she wailed, and the sea shouted back: “Wench! Sultry you wrecked them here, and broke each sung bone, then rent them out their sockets.” Then receding and more softly; “Knew you not of this, your grieving curse?” “Of course I knew, you implacable, overblown puddle!” “Then what will you do about it?” “I will leave this rock, leave my old life behind.” “But how will the sailors know of this rock if no-one is there to tempt them?” “That’s your problem, steaming sea! Why don’t you spend a thousand years trying to erode it with nothing but the breeze to help, and see how you like it?” And so the harpy opened her untried wooden wings that spanned the sides of Yarrow Rock. At the instant she was about to take off, she couldn’t resist giving the thin soil of the rock’s crest a final twist of her claws. The rock broke open, and inside was the sea.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 12:29:17 +0000