A day later than planned but that’s because I’m up in limestone mountains in Alicante, and spent time when I would I might have writing, pottering about on a ridge with views of Benidorm high-rises in the far and misty distance, while I looked for the remaining bones of a fox whose larger bones have been organised into a piece of work on my window ledge at home. It’s a sort of conceptual piece, a synthesis of Damien Hurst and Ted Hughes. Anyway. I found the remaining 14 or so smaller bones that have stayed undisturbed since last October, and they are now in a sandwich bag, and will be reunited with the others. I have imagined her to be a vixen. No idea why.
Last week I was rambling about Norman MacCaig’s ‘I took my mind a walk’. So let me take you round the town of Relleu in a sort of silent movie. No teacherly stuff this week. Just a poem about Sunday morning, called, unsurprisingly:
Sunday Morning
this narrow morning street
is shadowed canyon-cold and quiet
as an aftermath where the woman
in a shapeless cardigan tips out a bucket
and sluices granite setts as blue as mussels
and at the street’s steep end the sun has warmed
the church whose doors are set with steel
and damascened with hammered copper nails
and underneath the latticed iron balconies
a corrugated garage iron door is rattled up
and no one’s coming out but
three men in biker boots and leathers
appraise a Yamaha
and pink and lemon lycra cyclists
spool roud a curve and out of sight
as the old man shuffles carefully across
the way and disappears
and the blind man tap taps his way
along the wall and his mouth is pursed
and his smokeblack glasses reflect nothing
church bells aretolling flat and cracked
across the valley’s olives wild flowers oranges
the soil as pale as pastry the million terraces
the windscoured crumbling turrets
piercings crenellations revetements
the patchwork roofs the tiles
and all the untrodden paths and tumbled stone
the tended trees the ironwork on peeling doors
the blue graffiti on a Moorish wall
the cool greenness of a cistern this car
that’s slowly turning into rust
down in the gulley where the road turns
steep and tight back on itself
the river long since drained into its bed
geraniums that want for sun
behind a crusted grille
that need a drink and all this myriad
strange particular stuff
and you turn the corner
and stop dead for fear of falling
into distances where only mountains live
that only birds can understand
this endlessness beyond
the shadowed street
where a woman in the quiet
early Sunday morning
sluices granite setts
so that they shine
like mussel shells.
That’s it for this week. I’m off to look for bones, and, maybe eagles. Hasta luega. As they say.
Reliving Relleu as I read this in Rutland greyness! Have a fantastic time you old fox-hunter!! Say Hola to Chris and Ann! xxx
LikeLike
Fogs – still questing after all these years. Love the ‘granite setts … mussel shells x
LikeLike
Bob and Janet…chuffed that you’re reading it. And I should have said thankyou sooner. Too busy walking and writing. Which isn’t really an excuse…like saying: sorry I’ve not written but I’ve been indulging myself
LikeLike