Judith Beveridge
YACHTS
YACHTS
They are the sound of teacups wheeled off,
of a woolly butt's littlest birds rattling
song-bottles in all its sun-tiered racks.
And if you can imagine brittle bells
fiddled with and shaken, if you can hear
a woman placing her earrings in a pearl
shell, if you can hear the chime from
a lacquered box at the gateway to a Palace,
if you can hear the feet of a bird on tin
shingles in the depth of an agate sky,
then you'll know too the sound of a latch
dropping shut, and you'll know the little
shovelfuls of laughter children scatter
on the grass. You'll know the call
of an oriole on a lakeside walk and how
rain drips from branch to branch in bushes
that have broken out in buds. And you
might even know, some evening when
the weather's calm, the sky still blue,
how a child drops a soupspoon in a dish.
Or you might hear the bird, the one that
calls to whomever sits on the porch on
a summer's night and listens to the tripping
of bells from a bay, having already
struggled up a precipitous pass
and dared difficult, sultry questions
with their face open to the sea.
Maybe you only hear yourself stumble
up a staircase and drop your keys. Maybe
you only hear the sharp strike-notes
of bell-ringers announcing the passing
of another life, or hear your name on
the lips of sailors who sit with spray
on their fingers as they pull in the weights
and chip and chisel into the night.
Perhaps you hear your life winched in
under a dying sun. Or perhaps you hear
a child count stars in the water off a rickety
pier - despite clouds moving in, despite
gulls in the wind just off the masts.
woolly butt – common name for a species of eucalyptus tree with
fibrous bark on the trunk (or butt) with a “woolly” appearance
