Once a poem is completed in first draft, it goes into the folder called Patteran Poems. Many remain untended for months, sometimes years. Very occasionally I’ll jettison one, but only if I consider it so far beyond repair that it’s not even useful for spares.
The poem below was one such. I had decided that I couldn’t let the millennium pass without something to mark it &, low on inspiration but high on ambition, I banged it together on January 2nd, 2000. It has lain largely ignored since then. Today I set about it with scissors & glue….
A brief word about its provenance. Emma & I had passed the last night of the 20th century at the Gurnard’s Head Hotel just along the coast from the village of Zennor in Penryth, West Cornwall. It was dismal evening. We were stuck on a table with a dreary couple from Bagshot, near Windsor. They were horrified to learn that we were teachers & we were correspondingly dismayed to find out that they were middle management in an insurance firm. This perfunctory conversation had revealed that to pursue communication much further would have seriously prejudiced the will to live. The moment that the corks popped at midnight, Emma & I slipped over the threshold & into the January night…
PASSING THE MILLENNIUM AT GURNARD’S HEAD
Those three horsemen spotted by the prophets
balked the jump. Their hour came and went:
no hooves beating down the dry stone walls,
just a bitter wind wrapping up the house.
Inside, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and that choral counting
backwards, chanting out this year like it was
just another dead leaf burden to be kissed
into the fire. And then it was (implausibly) 2000
and they broke open the magnums. We stepped
outside, took the muddy path to the field’s edge.
So quiet at first. Maybe the real world just didn’t know:
cattle hunched clumsy by the bulky walls;
an owl that hooted once; the whisper of the gorse,
thorn against thorn, stones rasping underfoot.
And then, sensed first as restless space, then heard
as a presence inside silence, the black Atlantic,
breathing deep, breathing deep across the parabola
and beyond. While Gurnard’s Head gazed inland,
uninvolved, one more optimistic tide clambered
over cobbles way below. Out in the long darkness
it pulled, pulled, lingering on rocks and sand:
‘Reverse the narrative’, it seethed. ‘Turn time
backwards, return to source’. The message cackled
in the shingle, roared along the shore. We waited
in the rattling night one full hour into the millennium.
But nothing changed, nothing shifted, tilted, slipped
or fell away. Wind and sea, implacable land, the dark
unyielding. So we climbed back up the slope
to the silent house, slept briefly, waking to a
blustery dawn. And a voice inside the wind laughed
in formless vowels; and a brief shape-changing
cloud-face grinned across the unaltered world.
12:12:55 AM 
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