eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781925162189 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fremantle Press |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 767 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Southern Edge
Three Stories in Verse
By Barbara Temperton
Fremantle Press
Copyright © 2009 Barbara TempertonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-925162-18-9
CHAPTER 1
The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife
I
Dawn.
There's still a bit of south in the wind.
Waves have worried the beach in two.
The keeper's wife collects driftwood, feathers.
There is something about the air,
the intensity of colour,
that awes her. This place is an X
on her map of moments with God.
Whales exhale beyond the wave line,
flippers and tail flukes slow-arc from the sea.
At the high tide line: cuttlefish, shells, kelp,
and a dead shearwater half-cast in sand,
wings mocked by breeze, the memory of flight.
Another bird, feet at pointe, Degas' ballet
framed by footprints of dogs and gulls.
Thereafter, another seven, bills locked mid-cry.
Mist begins its skyward drift with the sun,
horses and fierce riders
thunder through the curtain into day.
Sea's silver, molten,
the air taking on something like substance,
as though she could reach out, touch something solid.
She has either left the world
or just stepped into it.
II
Cargo ships riding high in the water
sway on anchor chains — broad-hipped matrons
guarding the threshold of the channel.
On the rocks, two foxes hunt crabs, snails;
the vixen limps.
The keeper's wife has run away, again,
has gone as far as she can go, without a boat.
Halfway, she'd watched a yacht —
two men fighting canvas, ropes, the wind —
and the harbourmaster's red steam-launch
butting whitecaps, going nowhere.
Five cargo ships in the Sound today.
Salmon fishermen on the shore
battling nets, breakers, spray,
their voices drifting to her with seaweed
woven round a discarded hawser.
The fingers of God — sunlight through cloud —
seek out a pelican buoyed on the wind,
the guano-smeared beacons, crushed mussel shells.
The launch labours towards the harbour.
Aboard, the crew stand, their gaze intent
pon a tow-rope taut over tide change.
Five ships in the Sound. Five ships.
Sudden rush of fish onto hooks.
Five cargo ships.
Why must she always be working,
every moment extra-real,
the world so other-worldly, separate?
Can't she just sit? Enjoy rocks, wind, sea,
because they're rocks, wind, sea,
not to be turning to watch
the launch tow an upturned yacht,
to see one man astern,
apart,
see that man shivering.
III
Her bed linen was knotted when she woke,
but dawn was soft:
clouds, teased to string, evaporating,
the scrub adorned with broken branches,
breeze fretting at battered leaves.
The keeper's wife conjured
a storm in her sleeping,
funnelled it through her open window
into the night, scattering whirlwinds
like silver gulls across the Sound,
wreckage onto the rocks.
IV
Dog dances round lichen-lipped pools.
Startled sea-lions shed their sea-slicked grace,
retreat to barnacle embellished ledges.
The woman watches while her husband
and semi-pelagic children swim.
Two years, he'd said.
Three daughters and twelve years later,
her sense of another season turning over
is as sharp as the thorns on prickly moses.
Not an ordinary lighthouse,
her home on the hillside above the channel.
Not an ordinary lighthouse:
a cottage with a double-ridged roof,
south wall bisected by a weatherboarded tower
squared and copper-capped, three keeper-lengths high.
Not an ordinary cottage,
walls as thick as her husband's chest,
tower-light a maypole the keeper's wife
and daughters skip around west-east, east-west.
Once, she saw a ghost, grey as possibility,
drip salt water along the passageway,
mount the ladders to the tower.
Some long-drowned former tenant
drawn back to trim the twin wicks,
their combined bright light visible for miles.
Not an ordinary garden,
she's cultivating granite where the lighthouse stands.
Not an ordinary garden,
she's cultivating wind
to harass the keeper's tough-stuff,
purloined from flower beds in town:
agapanthus, ivy, morning glory,
growing stunted in kero drums,
through soils he's backpacked in flour-bags.
The woman nurtures native rush-grasses in fault lines,
a reclining melaleuca in the fertile gap
between two boulders, bright lichens
as a border between the land and sea.
Not a connoisseur of silence
she's cultivating noise,
the sea is never silent here,
the nights are never dark.
V
She can't keep the hall boards shining,
rain comes in, sand eddies in corners.
Cat, intended for rats,
abandons disembowelled bandicoots
before the ladders to the light.
Bull ants semaphore a chain of dashes
from wood box into shadow
beneath the pantry door.
The keeper's wife pictures
the viscid syrup tin, honey spoon,
flour spoiled by weevils.
Moth larvae have woven webs
in the folds of her apron.
She gathers their cocoons
into a small, sticky bundle,
feeds it to the fire.
Outside, the channel
welcomes a ship into its arms,
wake surging up the rocks
into the crevasse.
VI
Her mother's ring is silver,
inscribed with runes.
A familiar glyph might mean joy.
As much as she struggles to remember,
something
something
joy ...
she can't,
runs her thumb over the message,
as though she might read it by osmosis.
Silver scent, old coins oxidised in a jar,
tipped out in a moment of penury
for counting and circulation.
Her fingers take the scent, transfer it to her tongue.
The taste of money.
What good is anything? her mother used to say,
unless you can eat it, drink it or wear it.
Then she'd up-end her sewing basket
onto the table, remove the rune-ring
from her marriage finger.
And the girl who became the keeper's wife
would watch her mother
thread the ring onto cotton, suspend it.
Together, they'd whisper,
Show me a yes.
Movement was imperceptible, at first,
but became more pronounced,
ring spinning in a taut, agitated circle,
yes.
One day,
the girl knew,
the rune-ring would be hers.
VII
From the tower, kero drums,
performing their daily cycle
of expansion and contraction,
toll dully.
She knows the smell of kerosene
as well as she knows
her own distilled essence,
the scent of her children's hair,
the keeper's salty presence.
Kerosene smudges everything
with its hazy-blue skin:
is the lighthouse's other tenant,
always present, never seen,
a bitter layer on the lips
after she's kissed her husband's hand.
Kerosene and the light,
like nocturnal birds,
call at night
call the night.
VIII
They know the sensuality of waves,
whales, tails braided together —
the white of their bellies iridescent
beneath the bows of boats —
the slick ecstasy of giants
breaching in breathless displays.
Don't say 'leviathan', the keeper says.
It's a ponderous word —
does not do justice to the whale.
IX
Hot day:
they have the cove to themselves.
Naked girls swim into the darkest blue,
all three borne back in the belly of a wave.
Their mother adds her clothes to theirs.
She can't speak
about God and waves
or of how their sun-fired dazzle
threatens to blind her, bind her.
How they, too, sew her, her daughters,
double-stitch her to home and hearth.
She immerses herself, every cell
of her skin newborn with the novelty.
Surfacing, low in the cup between swells,
water eclipses the horizon.
The world shrinks back into the space
in which she floats,
blinking up at the sky,
eyes smarting from salt and sunlight.
There are pelicans in the thermals.
A wave buoys her up:
she wants to be flying with the muse of ships,
one hand on the tiller, mainsheet in the other —
careful not to spill the wind —
to be a figurehead on the cutwater of a ship
her feet dipping in and out of the sea,
to have the spray fly to her breast and cheeks,
her colour high, breathe Southern Ocean air,
go water walking in gales amongst the waves' ragged tops,
to be borne down, bottom out, surface through the swell,
gasping for air and salvation.
She floats.
Her daughters run, laughing, along the beach.
A warm current from the shallows swirls around her.
There is something out there,
coiled in the heart of the sea,
awaiting release.
Something here, too, its ears pricked,
waiting to raise its wings for flight —
on the horizon, the islands.
X
She sees, from the lighthouse,
as the keeper ascends the tower,
the moon climbing in daylight
over the soft rim of the Sound.
Later, from the Town Hall steps,
she sees it rise over the mountain.
A tall man in a white shirt,
one of the harbourmaster's crew,
smokes the last of his cigarette,
flicks the sparking butt down the grey-slate steps.
I've seen the moon rise twice, tonight, he says.
And it's not yet full dark.
In the channel
between harbour and Sound
waves labour at encroachment of the rocks.
In the lighthouse,
in rooms eroded by sterile conversation,
the rift has widened.
The tide's turning, she replies.
XI
Walking the foreshore in twilight,
he sees her thinking distance, size ...
How big is that ... swan?
Her amusement when she's told.
Kingfisher, the sailor says.
A bright and beautiful name
for a nest of rusting iron.
It's more visible at low tide.
She'd like to walk to the wreck.
Quicksand? Cobblers?
Tide change catching her?
What other hazards have made their way
to the bottom since colonisation?
What wreckage other than the bones
of a burnt-out coal hulk?
He's swum to the wreck at night,
moonlight trimming the fringes of waves.
Below the ocean's frothing mouth
is a mind not wanting illumination
or exposure.
She begs leave to stop her universe spinning,
feels impermanent,
emptied of her old hauled-in blankness,
and blind to blood and form,
unlike the past division lingering near.
Her dreams, loud and angry,
as hungry as the feral jetty cat,
sink their teeth into her hand.
The chaos in her head is calmed
by the touch of the man beside her,
waterways echoing with the prayer
of the two-filled her inside her skin,
the doubled her without.
She recalls an alien song,
its strange yet familiar syllables,
floats in his words
framed by nature
and empty of argument.
XII
The next day, she's absconded,
apron tossed across a chair.
Her daughters, at the kitchen table,
sharing warm scones, Golden Syrup,
melted butter sliding down their chins.
Their mother's sailing, soaring across the Sound
in a hissing, bounding rush up-swell down-swell.
Has gone to sea with Knute
from the harbourmaster's crew,
who invited —
sideways-glancing at her husband —
by softly asking.
Knute struggling to reef the main.
Caught in the open, too much sail,
woman at the tiller, yacht laying over,
angle so steep only the traveller
can bring the boat upright again.
Waves frothing braids within inches of her face,
the keeper's wife screams into the wind.
XIII
Ship, a comma hanging halfway on the horizon-line.
On Isthmus Hill
they walk a veldt of wild grasses,
together, but as taut as mainsheets
humming in the wind.
Drinking rainwater
pooled in the comfort of a rock,
her legs tremble,
undermined
by Knute's presence,
by the effort of their ascent.
She'd looked back at Bald Head
slipping south behind them,
the peninsula a whale
plunging into the Southern Ocean,
saw its eye — shadow cast on fractured granite —
the beast looking back at her.
XIV
Venus
and a full, orange moon —
fractured by cloud —
paint pathways on the dream-dark sea.
Buoys blink between cataract waves.
The beach is sequinned by watch-fires of fishermen,
torch eyes dance will-o-the-wisp.
The salmon are running.
Knute tastes her salty, sand-cloaked skin,
tongue tracing the track of a bluebottle sting
along the white coastline of her thigh.
XV
Bodies speak, kiss and fold together
then open, he out of her, licking as he kneels,
not mute-watered like a wave — rough rider,
dark like clay underfoot tumbling —
pushing noise and desire and loud, calm ignorance.
Love alone will not do. She imagines outside.
There's nothing sanity can choose as a focus
other than a sea-snake making ribbon-like miles
through kelp in some other ocean she has known,
tropical waters. It's too cold here.
She sings the water inside.
She lies awake,
rain sleeting against the portholes,
unwilling to draw the sail-cover higher, to rest,
remembering herself as a child calling into the dark,
calling uncovered and chilled boneless,
unable to warm herself.
Her body is suspended between waking and satiation,
her legs tremble, heart-pain catches her
like a green distress flare coursing through the night.
He sings inside of her.
XVI
Vanishing, as quiet as a sleeping child's breath,
as slippery as the lichen-slick rocks,
fast as the fall of the peregrine
bellying out on the wind.
Vanishing is her youngest calling up
to the sitting room window,
Look at me, Ma! I'm a mermaid!
She reclines on a rock in the sun,
legs scissored shut, feet splaying in fishtail,
sea churning in the channel behind her.
Vanishing is the sound outside
of the keeper checking rainwater tanks.
One returning satisfying dull thuds,
the other drumming emptiness through the house.
Vanishing is the red launch at the jetty,
the keeper's wife at the window waving
to the mermaid-girl laughing
at the black dog dancing round her.
Vanishing is Knute behind her,
his hands moving to cup her shoulders
and her own moving to meet them,
and him turning her, waltzing her
to the sibilant music of wave wash
and the unusually distant thunder
of a seventh wave in the crevasse,
her heartbeat quickening,
rope-roughened hands beneath her blouse.
Vanishing is the rushing-in hush
of water, the drawn-back breath
of a retreating sea.
A dog barking.
A big one ... nearly got me!
Lovers parting.
The keeper running in.
Then, all three of them at the window:
the launch adrift,
bumping along the channel rocks.
The sea-slicked rocks.
Dog paddling in a circle, barking.
Knute swims for the boat, the keeper the dog.
XVII
Emerald-green over the sandbars,
the sea is emerald-blue in the deeps,
submerged rocks brown smudges.
The keeper's wife stares into the water.
When they're fishing, if they're not quick enough
to bring up their catch, the hooked fish retreats
beneath a shelf the fishers cannot see
but legend says is there.
All they can do is wait —
sensing every twitch and calculated manoeuvre
through the filament between them —
wait for the fish to tire, then reel it in.
Shivering bone deep, the keeper
stands apart, studies the Sound.
Knute on the jetty, launch restored to its mooring,
grips the dog by the scruff of its neck.
It is hoarse, yet barks still, blood oozing
from its barnacle-savaged legs.
Coming down the path from the cove,
the two older girls, sunburnt, dragging towels,
share the weight of a bucket filled with shells.
XVIII
Barnacles have cut her feet,
halt her progress to the water.
The lighthouse keeper's wife sits on the rocks,
shoeless, legs scalloped by torn stockings,
shivers in her best summer dress trimmed with lace.
To everything there is a season,
the Reverend had said.
The Town Hall clock,
out of synch with time,
gives ten chimes for 1pm.
XIX
Her night observation from behind closed lids,
infinity and its shadow, eyes open,
sea-wraith materialises mid-flight, no time
for breath before chance distributes debris
wide and slow as haunted coal hulks slipping
into the troughs between pre-storm swells.
Rock is her destination.
XX
The keeper is in his favourite chair,
so bereaved he is drunk,
worn out with tending the light,
distraught daughters, distant wife,
tired of shepherding the sea,
directing currents in the right direction,
harnessing the unpredictability
of a supposedly predictable life.
Wind, shredding the whitecaps to rags,
hammers at the seaward wall.
Temperamental in big blows,
the twin wicks are susceptible to draughts.
His second girl climbs onto a stool
she's not allowed to climb,
but the room is spinning,
world painted black by sleep.
XXI
Shutters unlatch onto a night with no moon.
The window-child swings her legs over the sill, sits,
knows the rock below slopes to water,
surge roaring in the crevasse, spewing foam.
The tower light cuts through the night.
On the horizon, embedded in ink,
their sister lighthouse — Breaksea —
two flashes a second apart,
three-second pause then repeats
two flashes a second apart.
The wind betrays her, shifts direction.
The curtain billows around the window-child,
lifts her arms for flight, the fall, the dark,
its afterimage imprinted on her retina like a ghost.
The keeper sleeps.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Southern Edge by Barbara Temperton. Copyright © 2009 Barbara Temperton. Excerpted by permission of Fremantle Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife,The Gap,
Jetty Stories,
Acknowledgements,
Sources for in-text quotations,
Bibliography,