SALT RITES

 

The beach was empty of all things unseaworthy, except for the flowers, palely bedraggled and indistinguishable from the salt-ridden seaweed. The mourners cast them upon the grey waves only for the waves to cast them back.

 

The wake was being held in the cliff-top manor, the noise of which could even be heard at the sea’s edge. Tiny shapes danced slowly across the bay windows, since nobody had possessed the foresight to draw the long heavy curtains across the huge expanses of moonglit glass.

 

From the beach, though, with fitful frothy gurgles of prematurely night-stained sea in frisky dalliance with my bare toes, the manor appeared as small as a windswept dolls house precariously set against the precocious deepening of the sky.

 

I was to try to force my pebble-stung body up the sheer cliff to join the jollity, for jollity it would surely become if the corpse became a guest.

 

(Night Songs 1992)

IF BREATH BE FIRE

 

If breath be fire, then we shall finally go up in smoke. As they say, there’s no breath without life. But life without breath? Who knows. Yet I really must start at the beginning: the graveyard: a place that would normally have served better as an ending. Furthermore, in that same graveyard, Mary Louise lost her innocence. When she possessed two Christian names up front when other people had to make do with merely one (with any additional ones barely hinted at by initial letters) I am still uncertain. Perhaps she needed the force of two Christian names when faced with evil in the shape of myself. But I was not evil until she created the evil in me simply by her act of existence: like bait. And, yes, I am fully aware that graveyards were not exactly prime places for ‘wooing a sweetheart’; but as her widower father seemed to know more about young men’s intentions than an old man had any right to know, what alternative had I other than to sneak here out one moonless night, ensuring that the latch on the garden gate didn’t click? Only darkness, in the end, could further our possibilities. It was a short hop to the graveyard where I set about proving to her father, if vicariously, that I was no motherfucker, but simply someone who wanted to lay a ghost.

 

Mary Louise, I hasten to add, was no easy target. Her prerequisite was love. Indeed, we had already undergone a relentless period of ‘courting’: a word her father would have used in his right royal failure to call spades, spades. Public places had worn rather thin as means of passing time together. Time, if nothing else, needed to be spent expensively, given the nature of Mary Louise’s passion for nothing-but-the-best. If the trust were known (and, even upon the bring of breathlessness, she failed to grasp it), I was both nothing and the best: a fact which could not be understood other than by inference. Strong words and exactitude merely subtracted from meaning. Truth had to be worked at: worried and teased from the unsurrendering past. Only digging would suffice: through one of the loosened earths: towards a sainted fire.

 

 

(Vampires Anonymous 1993)