a rooking girl
who stole me for her side
Dylan Thomas
Sir John in his sea-legged shack, rocked
on the cradle of his breath, swings in his cot.
Above his roof, seagulls chide him gently.
The dark door of his mouth hangs open.
His walls dazzle with the sea’s brightness.
Far beyond his windows, huge freighters
move at the edge of light across cloud-clotted oceans.
But in his well-thumbed dreams,
Sir John pursues the ligaments of love.
Long-socked and sandalled in his howling days
he stumbles through the maze of brilliant light
to a cliff five worlds away where his six-year old
lover awaits, demure and naked in the naughty shade
of pine trees where he used to play and hide.
There, at the edge of sunsets, they may look
westward at the shimmering bay from where
a bird’s shadow dissolves in their pressed hands.
Sir John lies in his cross-wise house on a wrack
of days while the tides step in and out the bay.
The sun swinging up splatters the beach with towels,
arranges a gallery of exhibits: the sand and
bright dry cotton underneath frame oiled,
immediate, almost touchable, flesh.
Sir John longs from his eaves in the days between
the fourteen-year-old knights of his dreams.
Slender and awkward in his underwear
in the small hours of the night in an underground
chapel, beyond all chance of being found
or interrupted, he slips between white sheets
to meet a naked, wordless woman who
will introduce to him the courtesy of bodies
and take him in to rock upon her breath
and the wild seas of her flesh.
Sir John moans in his sleep. His tongue hunts
blindly in his mouth. He never knew
the dark night of his soul would have so much
flesh in it. He has mortified:
denied his need, buried it in letters.
Knowledge of it hangs behind the dawn,
looms at him across the sea,
gropes from the horizon.