Ship in a Bottle
from Prologue
Summary
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
I'd promised others and myself
that I would leave it all behind,
this quizzing mirrors
for his face.
Now here's
this hark-back thing
he made at sea
my stepmother kept and I
have coveted for years.
‘Take it,’ she says
too casually.
Making this, he too
was harking back
to how his father knew the sea,
massive rollings under men.
It's his equivalent of poem.
He means it for The Cutty Sark:
sleek black hull, rigging taut
with readiness, bowsprit raring to go,
gulls silent at the turn of tide,
houses, church, and lighthouse,
faces steadfast with goodbyes,
and then that first swell
felt in the muscle lifting the deck.
If I am to go anywhere with this
I must believe in voyages
and mainly in my own:
the Tasmania he set foot in
half-a-century ago, where
he knocked-'em-back
along the Hobart waterfront.
Ships like this (I mean
the ones that hauled
the convicts out) were eight
months roughing it.
He would ride it taking two.
I get whisked there in a day.
It speaks of silence,
infinite poising of the tide;
waves of putty never meant to lift.
Like Keats's little town, streets
are desolate; captain, bosun have
no cheering shouts to raise;
the ship's forever doldrum'd
on a painted sea.
If I dragged its stopper out,
or if by accident I smashed the glass
it would release a soundless sigh
like his that afternoon I watched him die.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cutting the Clouds Towards , pp. 3 - 4Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1999