Salt stiffened, her wings don’t lift
except pinwheeling feathers
caught helter-skelter by sea breeze,
sun bleached and lichen lined.
Watches for the hands rising,
faces breaking among shallows,
hope and desperation.
She sings for them.
Caged in her cove, she sings.
You and your dim accuracy,
head lolled loose
eyes whitened and widened
till the pupils blink out.
Words come clipped,
ransomed love letters
read like shopping lists,
or obituaries.
Call this a grey life,
the air sucked clear
your mouth a pursed funnel,
but I
am the culprit.
Found the bruises of your hands,
like marble sponge,
cold as stone
the heat slipping over you
without warming.
In the well shade you sit
while I sink deeper, darker
for the waterline.
Come up spitting dust
and excuses.
Shoulder a shallow cloak
of indifference,
already the hem unpicked
by those grasping hands
always tapping
rapping
at the weakest point.
Feel them at my temples
tonight, tomorrow, today,
at the weakest point
always tapping away.
Ah, I’m really hoping I got this right. The five Samuel Greenberg charms that I used for my response are as follows: dim accuracy / grey life / marble sponge / the well shade / shallow cloak. I tried to emulate Greenberg’s abstract style (though not quite as drastically as he employs the abstract).
I tried swearing at the garden pond,
to see if I could goad a water witch
into dredging herself up at at ’em
with enough pissed off vengeance
to take at least one body down.
I wasn’t decided on who I wanted,
squealing in her webbed, wet grip.
Half-thought if she came I’d go,
grab her right back with both hands,
test to see if she tasted stagnant,
or like spring water breaking free
after centuries underground.
For a while I wondered if my grandmother was magic. You see she would talk about the night she spent near Culloden. How my grandfather slept on sound, and she was tossed through dreams of screaming men. The English and their guns, against the all those clansmen, come to die. For a while I believe she’d walked the battle in her dreams.
The tartans, like welsh (for a while) were outlawed to break that spirit. Make them less like them, and more like us. Then they only rise against themselves. The English are very good at making adversaries of themselves.
When a friend shows me her family tartan, there was a plucking sort of feeling. An ache for a history only half understood, and twice removed. I could find it, put it on, but somehow I doubt I would fit. Not enough of the right stuff in me, to tie me into the pattern. Made me wonder how much of myself I can claim.
The loch waters rose
and I saw my own face there
to deep to be reached.
With a smile steeped in pomegranate wine
you laughed,
tipped your head back,
closed your eyes against the sun
painted in place
in a sky that never greyed,
unlike me
who seemed to leech all colour
from our Elysium,
so perfect in the way it held you,
in the way it caught me
like a trap.
Carol J Forrester 
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