The silent, random landscape seemed
to him almost lunar: rocks,
hairy with limp seaweed, tiny shells that
shattered like dry bones as he walked,
and flat sand.
His footsteps in that place could've
been the first.
Except it wasn't dead dry. Underneath
the stillness he caught
the creeping sense of wet life and the
smell of decaying
fish flesh.
The seamud sucked at his
shoes and bubbly seaweed burst,
splattering salty juice when
he stepped on them.
He nearly tripped over a
dead octopus clamped
to the ground. It looked
up at him. Its anatomical
jelly was both soft and firm
underfoot.
On a hanging
rock formation he
saw a girl, reading,
oblivious.
He could've
imagined her there.
Perhaps she
was part of
the landscape, like
the sea,
the shells,
the octopus,
the sand.
2 comments:
Charles, you have no idea how happy your message made me today. It's great to read more of your travel writing! The imagery in this poem is so vivid, my skin squirmed when he stepped on the octopus. Blegh!
On an unrelated note, your tweets are hilarious. I love your misadventure with fitness hahaha!
Can I just say I have effing missed your poetry??
So much beautiful imagery - "hairy with limp seaweed" was among my favourites, but also "fish flesh" and "splattering salty juice".
I loved the movement of the poem - the speaker is so passive, entirely overtaken by nature as he trespasses this seeming wilderness (how very Canadian lol).
Great twist of expectation from the line "His footsteps in that place could've / been the first" to then having a girl appear at the end. I really loved that, although I don't know if I could begin to put my finger on why. Maybe it's just the surprise of meeting another human being in that place. Maybe it's the fact of meeting a girl specifically. Maybe it's the fact of seeing a girl, and there being no conclusions drawn about her, no emotions evoked from her, keeping it at a simple observation with no more than a passive, reserved curiosity about her presence.
I love how she becomes a part of the landscape in this foreign world, not so much in a way to objectify her, but as a way of bringing attention back to the discomfort of the speaker, the underlying anxiety of not belonging to this place as she seems to be able to.
The only word that stuck out for me was "bubbly", because it seems too...well, bubbly to be a part of the subtler quiet of the poem.
Please post more wonderful travel writings.
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