She was the tender and voiceless siren of this appalling navigator
(Conrad, ‘Falk’)
You could carve a poem
from the images on any single page,
like the sea slipping and sliding
amid a myriad rocks on the shoreline
where colours in rivulets ebb and flow
and lives are not exchanged
but lived alongside, in jags
and jets, strange inlets and escape routes
and there would be closeness of mind
and the bearings of a different language,
the eternal foreign, sliding and slipping
between the pages, along the sands
of an infinite shoreline where images,
like rocks, like water, erode and stay the same.
David Punter has published six small poetry pamphlets, as well as poems in a number of magazines, including PN Review, Agenda, Ambit, Ariel and many others.
