He called out to the spirits of drowned sailors.

He walked down to the sea with the town’s fishermen.

He painted their grey nets in grainy gold on the beach.

He picked up ridged violet shells and blew wet sand from them.

He avoided striped red-and-white blinds on summer mornings.

He avoided the roasted façades of brick buildings on summer afternoons.

He noticed the oranges in the fruit stalls were shrinking.

He remembered in detail the railroad town where he was born.

He collected the rust and shadows that gather on ageing metal surfaces.

He licked his stamps himself, the envelopes addressed in green ink.

He glued the spout back on the broken chocolate teapot.

He opened the door to the deck and prayed the tree would burst with apples.

Notes

‘Ocean’

The languages invoked in this poem – Konkani, Sabir, Aymara, Tulu, Jarawa, Krio and Tok Pisin – are all associated either with histories of cultural transfusion or with histories of geographical isolation and a consequent endangerment; with contact zones, littoral spaces and trade routes, or with remote highlands or islands. All of them have had to contend with the aggressive claims of modern languages imposed and promoted through official use by newly emergent state formations.

Konkani, an Indo-European language, and Tulu, a Dravidian language, are spoken on India’s western coast, which has for millennia participated in the transregional circulations of the Indian Ocean. Sabir was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean’s sailors, pirates, traders, soldiers and artisans from the eleventh to the nineteenth century: with its roots in Occitano-Romance and Northern Italian languages, it absorbed Spanish, Berber, Turkish and Arabic elements. Krio and Tok Pisin are both English-based Creoles spoken, respectively, in Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea. Aymara is spoken by the indigenous Aymara people of the Andes, and is spread across Bolivia, Peru and Chile. Jarawa is the endangered language spoken by the eponymous indigenous group in the Andaman
Islands.

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‘Spelling the Tide’

This poem is based on an event described by the American philosopher, inventor, entrepreneur, printer and statesman Benjamin Franklin in Part One of his Autobiography (1791). See Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings (New York: Alfred A. Knopf/Everyman’s Library, 2015), p. 25.

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‘The Heart Fixes on Nothing’