I saw Doug Oliver last night
standing in the shadow of the tower,
Christeas's tower guarding the harbour.

He was not in line at the ditch
and did not need to drink,
he was listening attentive, invisible.

The black sea filled his eyes,
he walked with Shelley unconfined
along the sea lanes of perfect sound.

He turned his good ear to the waveform;
his words, his maps and theories of song
released on the air unencumbered.

I heard the dialogue with Alice begin,
a woman came into the room a woman
back and forth flooding the paths under the sea.

I heard it all for the first time,
pretty weeds streamed from their hands,
bodies in sea light walking in one another.

 

*

 

And sucked down into the oracle of the drowned,
into the dry cave, back-lit psychorama and honey glow,
the echoed rise and fall of the waves
beats this moment and the next to the breathing of the sea;
he stands on the dry powder floor of the cave,
Peak district manifold, Apollonian on this shore.

But the dead can speak only through us,
around here the living feed the grave,
talk, share food and pour out their hearts
unblinking with love in the mortal fact,
the secret monologue broadcast,
I'm talking to my mother though 18 years dead.

So if I wait for Doug to speak, my teacher, my poet,
I imagine I'll wait for ever,
even in this dry cave, in honey light,
wrapped in the murmur of the sea, of bees;
in the honeycombed tunnels running to Matepan,
you hear Doug speak in a land made unstrange.

 

*

 

Look the owls swoop and dive from the tower for you,
alive in their dialogue of death;
I was thinking Alice of the life shared
and the lamentation of its ending,
their flight sounding in your ear, patterned and lethal,
their beautiful trajectories alight
against the black wall of mountain darkness.
Poetry is the way we think and speak here;
in one moment wingbeat instants take flight
over the gulf under the eyes of the serene empire,
to Methoni and Coroni in the darkening west
and the unpeopled cities of the sea.

 

Copyright © Kelvin Corcoran, 2003