It is unwise to speak to the dead.
Kit had delivered the 100lb coal bags to the drop point past the steel rails for the whale boats. The shunting clipper was anchored offshore beyond the reef. The shallow landing at low tide also allowed the bullocks to cool down and eat the kelp. The cattle noticed the presence first. He saw them looking to a place behind Mammoth Rocks, the slow cud of contemplation at ease but alert, their ears back. He pretended not to see, slowly moving each hessian until he had counted the fifty. He sat back to wheel to eat bread, onion, and cold sausage. The six Chianina came up, their black noses muzzling around him, the lyres of horn scraping rock, their slow and gentle lows a bass to the wash of tide. The elephantine white of their bodies now dozing on primrose sand, the rich malachite bronze of kelp, the three masts against unbroken sky shimmer, the far slow bob of the skiffs letting go. An afternoon wrapping canvas, the one world dazzling as the streets of Granada he remembered as a touch out of the dray’s shadow leaned in.
He could not tell if it was a boy or a girl. It was not young and it was not old. How he could feel this he could not say. A tree fell, its enormous weight shaking ground and air. He was whorled in an eruption of events; birth and death given form by rain, lightning speaking many languages, a marching sound of days turning to weeks to years to decades to nebulae, suffocation and breath, the taste of moonlight on tongues, orbit and rotation, fish swam out of his throat, peace and furore took root in his ribs, he was a rainbow then ash. Questions roared and whispered, a gentle lullaby became a rage of avalanche by syllables and melodies. He rolled through his own being, fell beneath earth, was raised and flattened to pebble; his eyes were jellyfish then chalcedony. All the while he refused to answer to his name, even when it was pushed as sunlight out of bone, through his marrow, a fuchsin frog in his nose.
A smile opened as a door, slammed in his face, and opened again.
The damp beach is in his mouth. Kit rolls over, the wagon team have huddled around him, the coal sacks are gone and the invoice is nailed to the flatbed. He goes to the rockface where fresh water cascades from the cliff above to clean his face and to drink. The runnels sting on his torso and shoulders as though he has been spilled from barbed wire. He lets the steers wallow before retrieving the hitch from the way marker as they douse their hocks and kick out the last joy of free rein. They back carefully to widen the arc for the pull up hill, his arm over the neck of the right lead, humming as he strokes brisket with his other hand, Ya Ya’s old Romany song from exile in Lisbon; the words that cannot be uttered which hold the drifted away. Gentian eyes of crushed sea observe unhappily the kind bovate move as one, Kit’s long pole tapping direction in a rehearsed beat of experience. Tails flick, a sea eagle grids its survey, the ocean comes in with the afternoon’s take. At the final layby, he stops for rest, looking down on the perfect scene.
It is unwise to speak of the dead.
James Walton Poetry 