Fergus Allen
The Beachcombing
I
Rising early I find the sea in curlers.
Not that it minds, because I'm a non-person,
Hardly someone to keep it from its chores—
Scrubbing the ancient beach, washing the feet
Of the dilapidated cliffs and skerries.
Covenanted to perpetual drudgery
It has no option but to bend its back
And get on with the levelling down,
Dreaming while it works of time off in lieu,
Days when it might catch up with its sleep.
The morning after last week's north-easter,
When the foreshore had turned over a new leaf
And the shells I used to hold to my ear
Had been buried for palaentology's future,
My eye lit on a fisherman's good luck charm
Tangled in sea-lettuce and carrageen,
Oxidized metal, given by wife or girlfriend,
Was it Peter, Nicholas, even Andrew?
Whoever's martyrdom had been relied on,
The opposing forces had won that round—
Or so my nature drove me to assume.
Other days someone's dog might prance about,
A heraldic supporter on the loose,
Showering sand and wet over my trousers
While gulls circled above me, taking note.
Debris stuck between high water and low
Caught at my perambulating feet and eyes,
Dead things, things become junk, uncared for, jettisoned,
Plastic bottles asleep under the bladderwrack,
Like babes in the woods around Enniscorthy,
And indestructible tangles, cordage
Strong enough for a hanging, orange and cyan.
All this time my footprints trod on my heels
And the ferry—used to be called the mail boat—
Slid out from the lee of Killiney Head,
Steering unstoppingly for the east,
Tall, impersonal, with its nose in the air—
A coloured cut-out towed from wing to wing—
Incommunicado, hiding its feelings
And all its lachrymose comings and goings.
Did I want to be left behind, with burins
Of resentment engraving my blank features?
But the future could hardly happen without me,
Whatever the drinkers in The Bleeding Horse
Decided about my soft words and havering.
Sixty miles south Charon & Co were ferrying
Other gatherings of uncertain souls
Back and forth in their closed high-sided ships
(Hell's circles no longer being concentric)
As the sun shifted somewhere above the Tuskar.
The stuff around my shoes, cuttle-bone, razor-
Shells, a crab's pale underparts and extremities
Mixed up with strands of dark red algae, slopped
Round and about with the noisy shemozzle
Made by waves stumbling over their own feet,
Left me thinking of souls, like puffs of steam
Floating from the gullets of shrieking peacocks
And carried away downwind to nowhere
(Though the attribution of souls to shellfish
May not have the approval of theocrats).
Today's lot of rubbish is a new chapter—
The jellyfish spread out like cultured colonies
In a Petri dish, bacilli on agar-agar,
Drying in the sun as the desert fathers
Dried at their orisons in the Sahara.
And a washed-up lifebelt, white and scarlet zero,
Knocked about by the waves, the paint rubbed thin,
But the letters DEVON C C just readable,
Like a weak voice calling through atmospherics—
Though the drift of the message passes me by.
The dunlin picking about in the sand rise up
When I overstep an invisible threshold
And swirl in unison in the middle distance,
Turning as one, as an African hand might turn,
Pale palm showing briefly in the sunlight.
Further off, where something shapeless is lying,
Herring gulls are standing around like students
At an anatomy lesson, one or two
Even lending a hand with the post mortem.
Nothing much there, I fancy, for my sack.
II
An overcast day, the cloud-coloured waves
Thudding on my left and the cries of sea-birds
Working on my spirits. But the haul is good,
Namely, a baby's comforter, half a comb
And a canister labelled toxic waste.
The latter must be good for an interview,
A fee and a night's oblivion in Wicklow.
As for the comb it ought to come in handy
For someone with only half a head of hair.
(Staying cheerful can be a full-time job.)
Later I steer clear of bathers a mile off,
People being more dangerous than asps,
Though after-images of the younger females
Float on my retina for hours to come,
Rising and falling with the tidal cycle.
It is said that the girls left in the sea
Are as good as any that came out of it,
Even if the best fish swim near the bottom
And have to be searched for. Though not by me,
For whom drowning is nobody's business.
The hairs on my legs and body are aligned
With the drag of the waters off Mombasa,
Where my ancestors tested the new medium
But found it inimical to the mind.
The sea's my provider, not my element.
Offshore a fishing boat goes round in circles
Searching for its cork floats and marker buoys,
Stewed tea in a pot on the galley stove
And cigarettes between wind-hardened lips
Like pegs stuck any old how in a cribbage board.
If it's whiting they're after they can keep them—
Fish that God must have designed for the meek
And those repenting what they thought were sins.
But the birds are keen enough, crying out loud
About emptiness and the needy young.
Afternoon, and a snare among the dunes—
An empty wallet, with its false smile uppermost.
I kick it into the tangles of marram grass,
Being one to keep clear of police courts
And the apologetics of petty crime.
A sore thumb on the unlimited strand,
I've never asked to be looked at, never
Aspired to kingship or yearned for plaudits,
Never been one to beat a bronze-bound ball
Up into the sky with a mud-stained hurley.
It is for me to state, you to believe
In the time you buy with your surplus value.
The bluffs are not called that for nothing
And they'll resist the battering of the sea
For long enough to see me out, and you.
Someone approaches, a woman in boots
And mac, walking a weary spayed retriever.
I give her the time of day, but she just narrows
Her eyes, with closed-mouth smile, and marches on,
Anxiousness trailing like a waft of scent.
When I look round I see that she does not.
The clouds stay closed for the sunset, and darkness
Will soon be shooing me into my hut
For beans and bacon and rearranging blankets
And communion with my half comb and comforter.
Fergus Allen, Mrs Power Looks Over the Bay, Faber and Faber, 1999.