Water Woman, image by Nathan Spoon
Zion Offramp, 21, Coniston Water
Stone
flows like wood, the wood
like
slow water. Days and seasons
and
the big circling of the sky
wear
away the littlest noises, ornaments
and
outcroppings. The sharp
become
blunt. The blunted blurred.
Driving the motorway for the first
time
in five years, he noticed how the trees
have
grown!
The hills reshaped
themselves, smudged their clean
edges
with
sfumato of bush and grasses. I can
barely
see
the reservoir today: tomorrow
it
washes against my ankles.
Underneath
the sift of papers lurks
some
misplaced piece of electronica,
switched off so it can’t be easily
found. Literacy, command of the
lines
and squiggles, bound us
to that time-
span, roped like
climbers
to our grandparents’ grandparents,
sepia
shapes crowding the walls of dim
rooms.
The
Old Man across the water bears no resemblance
to
a recumbent old man, the launch pilot jokes,
unless
you’re stretched out on the street
before
a Coniston pub, laid low by too many pints.
The hill itself is bare, rocky,
formerly
a slate quarry. There is a lot of
slate
in these hills, their flesh in
fact—bundled
in
blankets and his own senile carpet of beard,
Ruskin
was rolled—in his invalid’s chair—among rocks
and
over ice, when the Water froze. Here
you could pretend the vast smoky
cradles of ash—Manchester, Leeds,
Liverpool, London—simply didn’t
exist.
Zipporah—Moses’s
exercise in exogamy—is there:
“Surely
a bloody husband art thou to me.” She shows,
in
the Professor’s copy, the face of Venus, impossibly
graceful Botticellian fingers.
Imagine them
fisting a sharp flint, incarnadined
from her toddler’s truncated penis.
“A bloody
husband
thou art.” Or a sharp bit of slate.
The
water vies with the stones at every turn.
From
the tiny turret room—abandoned after the night
he
wrestled naked with the angel Satan—
the
Water opens out like glass, the Old Man
stretches
over it like a leering demiurge. His mouth,
red
wet cavity, drainpipe for sherry and pink
flesh,
font of eloquence and invective (laus
et vituperatio)—the lip
crookt from that long-ago
dogbite—is
hidden deep beneath the lichens
and
mosses of the beard, maybe spangled
with
ice-beads, stony neo-Gothic Green
Man,
tendrils and leaves of carven rock.
“What’s the next station, son?”
mutters
the old man on the train, tray-table
crowded with empties of export
heavy. “And where’s this train
goin’,
anyway?”
—Mark
Scroggins
