At Sea It is not through weeping, but all evening the pale blue eye on your most photogenic side has kept its own unfathomable tide. Like the boy at the dyke I have been there: held out a huge finger, lifted atoms of dust with the point of a tissue and imagined slivers of hair in the oil on the cornea. We are both in the dark, but I go on drawing the eyelid up by its lashes folding it almost inside-out, then finding and hiding every mirror in the house as the iris, besieged with the ink of blood rolls back into its own orbit. Nothing will help it. Through until dawn you dream the true story of the boy who hooked out his eye and ate it, so by six in the morning I am steadying the ointment that will bite like an onion, piping a line of cream while avoiding the pupil and in no time it is glued shut like a bad mussel. Friends call round and mean well. They wait and whisper in the air-lock of the lobby with patches, eyewash, the truth about mascara. Even the cats are on to it; they bring in starlings, and because their feathers are the colours of oil on water in sunlight they are a sign of something. In the long hours beyond us, irritations heal into arguments. For the eighteenth time it comes to this: the length of your leg sliding out from the covers, the ball of your foot like a fist on the carpet while downstairs I cannot bring myself to hear it. Words have been spoken; things that were bottled have burst open and to walk in now would be to walk in on the ocean. * Simon Armitage
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 13:09:38 +0000
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