Product Description

Richard Gwyn's fifth book of poetry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1650088 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 44 pages

David Greenslade
“A marvellous example of vision during a period that often seems fearful of the mythic power of literature.”

Planet, September 2001
“Richard Gwyn’s poetry is the product of a transformative imagination. These poems are inventive and resourceful, a delight to read.”

Excerpted from Being in Water by Richard Gwyn, Lluis Penaranda. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hunger for Salt

Will I remember you in the dull yellow light
as a fish that enters my mouth, as a virus
that enters my blood, as a fear that enters my belly?
Will I remember you as a catastrophe
tearing between my legs, fine teeth slitting my lip
tongue touched with salt my tongue was crazy for?
You never confessed to those little thefts:
my mother’s ring, the statue from Knossos,
the locket I had kept for the hair of children
we never had. I can see you, come to steal my bones
small teeth so white, a necklace of coloured stones
clams and mussel shells around your waist
an ankle chain of emeralds. But now you have gone
back to the sea, I forgive your cruelty,
your violent moods, your plots of revenge,
remembering instead the brush of your skin
on mine, the way you looked at me that afternoon
in the sea cave, the gulls clamouring outside,
a crowd of angry creditors in a world otherwise
gone terribly quiet. And you, nestling in
the white sand, caught in the nets I wove
with a devout sobriety, turned utterly to salt.

Voice

What did we talk about? The answer
eludes me. All those unfinished sentences,
pauses; silence. Our daylight hours
spent watching a perpetual sunset. Nights
when we swam in the pine-circled bay,
scattering phosporesence, diving
with the turtles. And when I remember
your voice, it is a descent of pearls
through water, labials and fricatives
lighter than oxygen, those liquid vowels
that went with night and water;
a voice dusted with fine
white sand, calling through pines
like an improbable nightbird
alone in an enormous forest.
Your voice was your armoury
and your line of least resistance,
a paradox among voices
almost always nearly breaking
nearly sure of itself, nearly broken,
nearly breaking through. Years later
I hear your voice in dreams,
mellow, teasing, arousing these
disastrous emotions, as if
a hole were being drilled through
my plexus, and the solar milk
sucked out through a straw.
In the morning I stand naked,
look at the hole in my stomach,
poking with my fingers,
and I say: ‘your voice did this’.
But that is not true. It is my memory
of your voice that does the damage.