David Butler

Minatory

All night the tide, engorged, has charged,
foamed, bellowed, pawed at the shingle.
Morning has tamed it. The moon-faced girl
who plays amidst the detritus has
quite forgotten her terror now.

Idly she lines up shell and fragment
in the wrack. The sea is watching.

Could she read these runes, might she
thread through their maze the mounting
wave and undertow; the bestial swell
of obsession; the monstrous birth;
the black sail that drowns a father?

Father

What unsigned city is it that you wake in,
featureless, or with such altered feature
the streets are not familiar, or if, with
shifting familiarity, like the dreamscapes
you wake from? What day is it, the moving ridge
hammered flat that separates past from future
so all is present tense, a watery time
in which the hours gradually dissolve?

How is it that memory, once so sharp,
has lost its stylus, and slides across the surface
leaving no impression but vague anxiety
that something isn’t right? And who are we
who have come to ask you? Forgive us
this daily trespass through your threadless maze.