Origami Microchap

Times Beach

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Cover photo by author

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i

If I close my eyes
I might be walking on snow,
salt crunching beneath my winter shoes.

Open your eyes; look up.
That might be a winter sun,
damp as a flare
drying in the ocean.

In the Bible Lot’s wife cowered
beneath the sun,
and he was left to walk alone
across all that remained of her salty ashes,

but here no water is visible;
only a salt-crust dried
onto the dunes. And behind me
the screams of children
daring each other to scream,
their bodies whipped
through a metal corkscrew
sixty feet above the sand.
The smell of spun sugar
and the vinegar tang of salt
sweetening the sea breeze
crossing the Irish Sea.

ii

I walk out to sea,
keeping apace with the pier.
Locked and chained this year;
the beer kegs emptied,
machines stripped of washers
and bent Irish coins.
Deck chairs flapping like sails
on the Mary Celeste:
a ship that never puts out to sea.

The wind is good, but there’s no captain
to set a course, no landlubbers
who believe in the journey.
The five layers of paint peeling the rail
will only be cracked by sun
or seagulls; I can still feel
last years flecks burrowing beneath my nails.
It was last painted yellow in 1973.

Looking down from up there
is my usual measure of peace;
the stillness of crabs in stranded pools,
a bird of prey picked clean of its calling.
Here time takes on an audible meaning:
you can charge its steady ticking
by listening to the rope on the flagpole
drum a shallow tattoo.

Past the pier now: dark patches
of oozing mud, as though generations
have stopped to pee there,
mud tugging at your heels if you stand
too still. But reverie is for the sailor
who never put out to sea.

To the true seaman crossing an ocean
is like blowing a safe:
too little powder and your arms
are braced behind the mast. Too much
and your boat will plough the weight
of the waves, and the ashes you swallow
will be the dreams you once braved.

iii

Shells like opened penknives
cluster into fans upon wavelet dunes.
I add my weight to those
who have already crossed over.

Dead skins once living,
secreted from the skins of worms
living on sand. Eating sand, excreting sand,
staining it with the life it needs
to go on living through its slow
sleep of life: pounded slyly by summer waves,
powdered into the sand you find
in the creases of your pockets
when you turn them out at summer’s end.

iv

Here is the ocean: fragments
of a thousand diamonds lost at sea.
I look and look, but may not go in;
my heart still beats too fast.
To match the ocean it must be
as still as a snake patiently devouring
its prey. And in that moment
I feel the water lapping
and the sea-birds screaming
and know that there is no need
to go on, nor any reason
to turn back. Only to wait,
as Lot waited,
dreaming that in another land
there is another desert,
where all who have been
or are becoming
sleep like patient crabs
in tide pools on the shore;

and sand is only the dust
of better days to come.

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Ian Mullins © 2022