Words and Lines

Tris Kerslake

An Imported Woman

(upon emigrating to Australia)

by Tris Kerslake

With a pristine visa in my book of Union Jack lacking rabies, I am quickly told to hold my breath as smiling men eradicate my European germs, replacing them with bugspray from a giant can.

I leave my flying days behind me for a while and take uncertain steps beneath the massive sky. The very tarmac holds a foreign tint, the taste of heat, of warmer hills, exotic on my breath.

I do not have the style of Belgian chocolate or even cuckoo-clocks, and so must infiltrate the land of Bondi with the cluttered bags and petty contraband of clinking duty-free.

I declare that I have nothing to declare, no home, no job, no bank account that ties me to a previous life. I do not even have my luggage which has, tradition-bound, settled in Hong Kong.

And ever so polite the smiling men in uniforms of custom lead me through a screeching zoo where mingled global accents carry me away to posters of the Parthenon and Fiat cars.

With just a bag of underwear and paperwork and stolen hotel pens, I exchange my allegiance for a cup of tea, trade my woolly climate for the silk of sun, allow my prudent feet to walk a southern path.

And with the Thailand sniffer-dogs and with the dreaded fruit-fly and the stowaways and gin, and with the missing rain and endless smiling men, I am bid a welcome to this recent land.

Mildura

by Tris Kerslake

A brown place, a dry-brown place. The long roads, flat roads, roads of dust and tumbleweed, roads straight to nowhere. The broad fields, fields stretched taut over the bones of the land, dry fields. The solitary trees, the white trees, trees in isolated splendour that march along the roads, that frame the broad fields. Mildura: a brown place, flat, broad, isolated, dry-brown place on a road straight to nowhere.

A busy place, busy like the old-time milking shed, bustle and stop; bustle and stop. Trains pass through, and buses, cars, multicoloured bees that buzz and zoom their ways. They paint the parking lot by numbers, they hug the noon-day shadows bright as flowers. A working place, square red buildings, low-roofed squats, air-conditioned, humidified; a worker’s place. Busy shops, tourist-sated, sprawling, undignified and cheerful, ice creams for the faithful. A busy place, buzzing, flower-bright, low-roofed, conditioned, and always ice cream for the faithful.

A young place, an old place, not for the middle years, get born here die here, no living here. Children squeal away the heat in garden sprays, dogs bounce and pant, parents sweat. Old folks rest and dream beneath the Jacarandas, dream of cooling breezes, dream time. Take the short way home, I would, the wrinkled woman polishes the sun away with cream. School comes out, drooping socks, tired satchels, sticky backs and books. A young place, and old place, squeal away, dream time beneath the Jacarandas, of sticky backs and books.

A dull place, bigoted, tucked into Victorian stays, no eagles ever landed here. Whitewash the back fence, brush down the fretwork, keep nice, behave. Whites here, blacks here, yellows and the sunburned pinks, elitist Mallee bulls. Unemployed, out of work, bludger, slug-a-beds and drunks, mate – you should see em’ all. Mildura, dull, bigoted, Victorian, whitewashed, sunburned and unemployed, mate – you should see em’.

A party place, night-life and restaurants, yabby-blues and three-inch steaks. A tourist place, meet you by the souvenirs, teaspoon capital of the State. Meet you in the Worker’s Club, meet you at the mini-golf, meet you in Mildura.

Only Rocks

by Tris Kerslake

Mere silica, this granite shaded into time. Some carbonaceous remnants, limestone tokens, shale. A poet’s tender soul should run a mile from you, and seek the softer song of lakes.

Fitted more for warriors, these cliffs that blast the edge of life, which hold the land, and guard our sleep are nearer shepherds, tending flocks of farms and cradled streams. No theme of war or bloody chant from them, but lullabies on gentle nights and sea’s lament.

And peaks, above the seasons, shrugging thunder down, who will not move, are fearful things, but from them we can see a world below, painted scenes of light and such beauty in the artist’s eye, these heights are only ladders placed for clearer views.

Nor is the crumpled empty scree of older days a bitter place, a waiting-room, it holds a piece of time, a slice of movement and of endless change, a chance for some to stand apart and breathe, to understand that pebbles on a barren shore are sometimes jewels.

Keep softness, keep oceans and the pretty cloud. Make paper ballads from the dainty birds and blooms, but give me only rocks and stone, the certain things, and I will write the very earth.

On Bridges: Leaving and Arriving

by Tris Kerslake

Leaving is what they’re best at. Homes, jobs, lovers, debts farewelled in a single step.

And yet we cross them ever backwards, and think the path behind much kinder than the one ahead.

Ignore the cars and trucks and trains, our freight, impossible for them to hold weighs nothing.

Famous or slabs of wood, their role the same as Moses, “I have seen the promised land”.

Arriving can be difficult for them. And souls, still caked in foreign dust are often lost.

Our purpose is too raw, too evident, expecting signs, we rarely see the road beneath our feet.

And fast, collecting days like plastic bags, reluctant now to check the where, the here, of deep ravines.

Simple or steel-embraced, our need the same as Moses; to reach the other side.

All Roads Lead

(The artist to his old love)

by Tris Kerslake

There are days when choice of distance and of place seems proper, when mundane objects are accepted for the likely messages they are, when time ticks by the little clocks and I am almost here.

And there are days when effort coats my every turn with leaden scales and nothing moves me from the fog or from the suffocated, when apathy and gin are both excuses that conform.

And there are times, when the crossroad where I left you burns with wasted wanting, blind directions in my deeper mind, where journeys never taken, never savoured strike me speechless.

And with the choice of distance, when your unchanged voice still calls me home, the petty hours are weightless and proper things inane. I count the time in terms of hollow years and your absence.

And with the nights, when I am ineffective and fiercely incomplete, I press unmeasured ruins in my art, my love, my breath is offered on a canvas fit for sightless eyes, discover that which moved me has not changed.

And now each day I am alone beside the road where you may walk and see the new as old, the old as never lost, a world apart from you in only distance, merest miles of transit from the place we had and I would have again.

Remembering Swansea

by Tris Kerslake

Roll out the damp slab promenade of Swansea Town where seagulls still proclaim their common greetings to the scallop men, and hold the echoed footsteps from that time which ring much longer in the mind than present footsteps ever shall.

Breathe in the brine that Jones the Fish called life, amidst the ever pungent whiff of sticky laverbread, my mother’s least desired dish, longside the memory of simple traffic which a dog could cross, hindered by no more than homely potholes and a distant tree.

Strum hard the painted park-green gates and rails with older fingertips than once were mine, and count the swings that cry unseated by the marching sycamores, greater both in mind and bole since youth, and see that all of us are far too seasoned now for little local shrines.

I beat a drum that’s far from Swansea Town, yet mute reminders ache to muffle all the world outside in granite tones and roaming shades of slate. No foreign anthem fills these streets, this small Welsh town, so known, still loved, exists within a pounding passion of my own.

Summon senses thin and faint from absent years, a sound, a scent are all I have, and puzzled am I that so plain a name can wrench me decades back, commands the sight which turns me blindly now and once again into a child of Wales and solid Swansea Town.

Missing

by Tris Kerslake

Voices that sing me no more by the turf in Cardiff Arms, chanted anthems rising from the lungs of fifty-thousand Welsh, and for the blood of trampled Frenchmen in the scrum.

The scent of heavy honeyed rain running off Glamorgan hills, and from the further blue, a filmy salt of seasoning encasing all, they are long gone, the precious elegies I once desired.

Slower sunshine on the valley carpeting of butter gorse, and boots awash in bracken’s crush, the rot of oak and beech, tilted drifts of ancient ash that burned on summer nights.

The scrape of lichen-yellow granite walls, the black of crows, resting their nights on chapel sills and sooty rigs of collieries. Their blended colours were the shade of passing times.

Eloquence upon the street that ever raced through costumes, opinionated fancies owing more to who their father was than faith, a harmony of voices humming through their shopping lists.

No black upon my arm for memories, no outward sign, clothed in green and gold I gather descant icons beyond note, and yet, I sometimes crave an older scale.

O bydded i’r hen iaith barhau

(Oh may the old language endure, from 'The Land of My Fathers', Welsh National Anthem)

Sennen Cove

by Tris Kerslake

An artless place of mine, my sunny younger games were played out here. It was my box of dress-me-ups, where different shoes could make me fisherman or keeper of the coast. I spread my childhood on its steeper hills, among the fragrant hedges and along the paths.

I knew the fields then, knew the cut of barley and the stacking days. The garnished general shop containing bags of candles, aromatic hessian and cheese, was just a shortcut for digression and for sherbet-dips.

And there were days when I would roam the cliffs and call the ancients from their rocky holes, and lay beside the stiff sea-pinks.

And up the road there was the only local church that claimed eight bells. Guiltless, I would tow the chords and vanish as the doors began to close, but even then, I was not always saved.

Beyond the fields again, passing tractors on the run right down the hill, where tracks of sand dragged by lazy wheels brought up the beach, and dark-eyed empty chalets of the foreign rich made photographs.

From this place I met the sea each day to add the nodding heads of gulls and tourists come to pick the shells. My eyes could count the black-tar lines of ships whose names were painted on the shore by accident and lifeboat yells.

And I would leap from rock to rounded rock stained by oil and weather, and call them mine.

My school sat on the topmost point, a craggy box of solid stone, bequeathing stoic glances to the summer trade, quickly passed by adults fearing echoes. I skipped through endless rhymes and sat on walls forbidden by their height. The scars of growing showed beneath the monkey bars.

By swinging wrongly on the educated iron gate the council houses just creaked into sight, but only just. With one eye closed I saw enough, and then the bell would let me run.

And down beside the bluestone water’s break I’d haul the frilly ropes of wrack and kelp, discovering the homes of hermits and of sunken treasure, urchin-case and opaque glass.

Then up upon the cliff once more, to fit my feet in rabbit holes and spy the tiny tracks of evening rambled in the summer earth. I knew each one by name and walked their roads with cautious joy. And in a bowl of light a viper coiled, asleep or dead, made me copper warnings.

And the dusk of empires gave me fantasy, silent purples of the heather and the sky, above the heat of salted grass.

In the final dark, the light of Longships echoed back and forth across the blank of waves. My father’s light was often lost by me as I would shun the man-made for the matchless, listened to the turmoil of the rocks below, Atlantic fingers washing me away.

And I promised all the winds that I would stay making pacts between the clifftop and cove, never dreaming that the choice was not my own.

Cosmopolitans

by Tris Kerslake

London

Sophisticate, she thought the sixties nothing more than a mid-life crisis. She had her flings with Shakespeare and aristocrats, but still a lady who turned her recent eyes to politics and European statesmen.

A grande-dame, contemplating august days, she shakes her head at bomb threats and the franchised foods that taint her cobbled alleyways and lanes where kings made government and precedent and often, their mistresses.

She wears the age of industry quite well though wrinkles have appeared beneath her smiling mask, and while she might bemoan the endless change she never minds the railways nor the roads, but disregards the tourists.

Plymouth

A country lass with rosy cheeks and hair that ruffles in the breezes from the coast of France. Best known for rumbles with the Spanish fleet she plays the tart with N.A.T.O. and with time, as history becomes her.

She often waves her sailors far away and smiles at names like Mayflower and Gipsy Moth. Her scars of war are almost hidden now but sometimes, in the quiet nights, she tuts at all the endless carparks.

A-stride through watered valleys, crossing streams she reaches over softly-rounded hills, her arms are broad and brown and hold the proudest names. Rustic beauty, she temps the sea with shapely coves and rivers.

Melbourne

A mobile phone away from anyone, she damns the cars that clutter up her painted parks. With chic-black stockings and stiletto shoes, her busy days are fraught with architects and trite domestic faux pas.

She flaunts herself at theatres each night with dinner at the most exclusive eateries. Her name is linked in scandal-sheets with those who build tall spires and steal their millions from savings banks and pensions.

Yet she has style. In marbled halls and shrines she gathers all the notaries of class and shows just what a modern woman does. Besides, she doesn’t really care what you may think. She has her own agenda.

Morlaix

She greets you with a salt-raked ancient smile, and hobbles off to meet the petit bourgeoisie who saunter in and out of market stalls. Ca va, she trills her weekend call, and picks her steps through laneways.

Inky-dressed, she clings to old demeanours lacking any reason to adapt. Black-bird eyes miss nothing as the stuttered French makes fun of ancient tongues, English shoppers scurry as she brings the Gallic rain.

Counting out the francs, her lucid fingers calculate how much to sting the interlopers. Vin ordinaire at cost, but she will take your last centime and chuckle wildly as you part with little fortunes.

My Wales

by Tris Kerslake

I sit on a hillside and contemplate the view. I see what the wind sees, what the cloud sees, and the three of us contemplate my Wales.

In grey light see the skyline paint the jagged peaks, erratic breasts and whitened nipples of the mountains. Towering physique, the harshest granite slopes are soft for her children. She welcomes me home with stillness and silence.

From this hillside I see my black land, rich in history and monuments. From the mother mountains down the frothing white of river, following the wild kings road. My eyes go north in dark grass steps. See the melancholy lines of erosion and ancient waters, see the foundations of the land.

From here the quiet heaps of slag cannot be seen, remnants of busier days when coal was more than country. Neither can I see the stone-wrapped towns of butcher shops and tiny chapels, where the choir sings everlasting hymns of glory, a purer exultation than speech. I cannot see the factories and pits from here: they are mere knowledge.

The croak of a crow distracts me. Black, like the crushed black gold that lies beneath me, it makes its own Welsh song: harsh, unlovely. Primitive. I wish it a good-morning; it looks once, then flies away. I spoke in English. Try it in the Welsh, I thought, but I could not. Time, time that grows us all old, has withered my tongue away. I sit on my hillside and curse time in English.

Wales. It lies, just off the beaten track to England. Neglected, hidden little place, My Wales.