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Currajah

[a Walleah Press blog]

 

MARY JENKINS

       A Blossoming of Skeletons

This fossil flower

smoothed by years of caresses

no longer rests

in the hollow of her neck.

 

Half a life ago she sailed

in a boat with a wine-red sail

from Gotland: god’s land -

’though you wouldn’t know it -

 

to a smaller isle in the Baltic Sea

where a wind-crippled juniper grew

and sheep could no longer graze.

Here was Bergman’s mis en scene;

 

an unlikely setting for love;

no place for a woman

who lived barefoot among

frangipani and hibiscus.

 

But the man at the helm

was subtle as a homing serpent;

fine of touch; he sought nature’s

purity of shape in glass design.

 

When she looked down -

those thirty years ago -

she saw the fossil, porous

a blossoming of tiny skeletons

 

and became absorbed

imagining rainbows

coral and fish swarms

when this chill world was warm.