Evening darkness. Trespass. Walking blindfold

down a private road to a public beach

to fuck, like an order, lie down and fuck.

If the lighthouse shoots us one of its looks,

so what. Then back to the Anglified room

with its Lloyd-loom chairs, its iron bedstead

like the gasworks gates, its Armitage Shanks,

electric candles and motorised drapes.

We dug out the cork from a bottle of red

with the car key, drank from the neck, then slept

naked and drunk on the four-poster bed

with its woolsack mattress and stage-coach springs.

The fire—a paper-pulp, look-alike log

in its own, flammable, touchpaper bag—

burnt down as neatly in the polished grate

as it should, made flames without smoke or ash

or heat, and got us to dream the endings

of afternoon films and old, hardback books.

A place like this could go up in a flash.

By day we looked for our octopus print

on the beach, but a high tide had been in

to clean and tidy the bay, to flush out

creases and seams. Houses of wood on stilts,

blasted by years and the flacking of salt,

stood back from the front, held on by their roots.

Rock pools were bleary with seaweed and brine.

We were writing our full names on the beach

with our bare feet when I stood on the bird.

Peeled from the sand, hauled and held by its bill,

its parasol wings swung open and out

in a sprained, unmendable twirl. Stone dead—

the sodden quills, the nerveless, leaden flesh.

This was the turning post, the furthest point.

Here was the archaeopteryx of guilt,

this dinosaur hatched from its fossil shell

to doodle-bug out of Atlantic skies

or strike home riding the push of the tide.

It had to be photographed, weighed and sized,

named and sexed, had to be hoisted and hung

by its sharp, arrowhead skull—like a kill.

Then what? Either I raised it to heaven,

arranged its bones as a constellation,

kept on running under the empty stars

of its eyes, under a snow of feathers.

Or I followed the fixed look on your face

to an unmarked circle of sand from where

we could double back, leave this gannet’s corpse

beached between open water and blue sky,

eating into the beach, feeding the sea.

SALVADOR

He has come this far for the English to see,

arrived by bubble through a twelve-hour dream

of altitude sickness and relative speed, of leg room

and feet, headphone headache, reclining sleep.

Jet-lag slung from the eyes like hammocks at full stretch,

mefloquine pellets riding shotgun in a blister-pack.

This far south for the English to see, as they say.

The hotel drives towards him up the street,

he turns the keyhole anti-clockwise with the key,

the water spins the plug-hole backwards as it drains.

He counts the track-marks in his upper arm

and those in the buttocks and those in the calves,

the pins and needles of shots and jabs, strains and strands,