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ON BRACKLESHAM SANDS

The burnt-skin glare of day, sun sighing,
Beaching into reefs of deep red light, as twilight reels in the bay.
The darkening night shore smells of nameless sea flowers and of death.
Lights up.
Neon columns proclaim the distant town, and the raw, rough boys.
Out there, beyond harbour; stationary ships, slack bouys,
But hopeful lights,
And here, braving the hard shore edge, the square box windows on private lives.

Trippers retreat and we reclaim new territory; the fishermen.
Moon films of sandy wet, mounded by riggish worm,
Everywhere the bait, under our stealthy feet.
A torch beam blinks, goes out, searching and dipping in and out.
My new found neighbour in the dark? A friend?
His grittish, shadowed knowledge shy of those purer trails;
Bright corridors down the lovely moon,
Across the wild sea, to you alone, to me?
My private, sacred angle,
But shared by everyone who looks and moves along the shore,
And wide as seeing.
A person is like a poem’s line,
Experience the sea.

We are all illuminated, or darkened.
We are everything, or nothing; pebble or the sea.
I loved you, but lost our thread. The cast too sharp, I broke the line.
Why did you hurt so much, for fear of being hurt,
Or fear of hurting? But nothing can be caught.
Cut fish flesh, blood, and a barb,
Weighted on sand slop beach, then flung to the shrugging waters:
The dead-head plop of expectation,
My isolated drowning, or a rising dream of hope.

Who needs a fish,
Trust to the land?
Two girls, hand in hand,
Come trailing the whispering bay,
Suddenly laughing, out of the dark,
Navigating my alien warning, my weird intrusion,
To disappear down the moon,
Like youth.

The world is a trick of the light.
A child can feel the sea through the new dropped line,
Sense into mind, testing the hopeful mystery, then knowing,
Pleased or shocked or horrified.
But we grow into failing feeling, for safety’s sake,
Or trust blind luck, a skill, much harm – the catch.
Or we drown in scales of pain,
Too sharp for human skin,
Cutting an opening in our dying blood.

Borrowed rod, fixed point, nowhere,
Sunk in the sand,
Stabbing the spattered stars,
For delicate direction, certainty,
But flagging a sea of centuries.
Yet the bay held us all, whole, in this element, a while,
Soft kissed the dreaming air, and gently urging swell,
Wide as the swaying sky.
Its silent crash of noise, then boom,
Sounding my restlessness and wanting.
A longing, limitless, or a learning to be in peace.

Nothing stops. Everything is dark and light, moving.
Scales of the sea bass moon glance on a breaking wave.
As the earth tilted back on the crescent,
Sunken to half blood orange,
A giant question in the sky,
It vanished too, over the rim, hooked on its orbit; but a sea change.

As the tide-turn changed our fisher minds.
We both crept up the shore, shifted, wary of cold, failure,
Purposefully drifting back,
Neighbourly as seaweed.
As the earth rolled back, looping the lightless sun,
Curving again, through sleep, into glaring waking,
The stars were endless though, the sea a lovely dream,
Wet sand on skin as warm as touch re-found,
While an ancient line, taught into deeper waters,
Caught me nothing, and everything.

DCD

Why the interest here, suddenly, about the rather good Phoenix Ark article about Drue Heinz, during the war in Switzerland, and her links to the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA? It is surely too long back to bring any interest from the Services, even if Drue Heinz was such an enormously prominent Manhattan socialite, and bound into the Heinz fortune too, if Baked Beans have had a crisis recently. She funded the Paris Review and many arts projects.

Yet that necessarily murky world demands a few answers too. What really happened to Dale Wilford Maher in 1948? What links did that group in Switzerland have to the chemical plant, IB Faben, that used Jewish slave labour? What was that meeting in the Swiss house just after the war really about? There is a strange story involved about ALIU too, the Art Looting Investigation Unit, set up by American services, because people at that Swiss home were certainly involved in the Art world during the war and with figures like Goering. It would make a good movie, but if we’ve touched on anything sensitive, and again those neutral territories were always the centre of spying, we are currently on Corfu for a chat!

It remains true that despite Bill Clinton’s efforts to open the files on Switzerland, as part of the Holocaust Commission, and on the programme instigated just after the war, called Safehaven, which crucial people like Allen Dulles wanted ignored, turning American attention towards the Soviet Union, many of those important files remain closed. Open them and you would find a can of worms indeed.

Well, you don’t see that every day! Vidos, of course, the little environmental island just off Corfu port and this time it wasn’t the sealions, but a group of six Serbian blokes, unfurling that red, white and blue flag on the boat over, with the double eagle that is also the crest of the Greek Orthodox Church on Mount Athos. The white haired Captain pumped out semi military music straight from the Second War and sunbathers stood up, startled as we docked. They were taking a Cross to the island and in two days the Serbian Prime Minster will visit too, for a little ceremony and blessing, once a year. It must be the Serbian hospital links from WWI and mixing Balkans sensibilities. But since an ex was Serbian American, not that she ever knew anything of her own history, or anyone else’s, will the haunting of Phoenix Ark never stop?!

Since we are supposed to love animals, and actually do, more about the wildlife on the little isle. We forgot to mention the tame rabbits, that have clearly bred with hares, by the size of their springy back legs, hopping around the restaurant regardless, among the tame and strutting pheasants, as if no one ever had any idea of eating them at all. Vicious evolution appears to have stopped on Vidos, with the beautiful views back to the island, until the boat missed its first five o’clock stop and then was half an hour late for the last bus home. Phone calls were made. Joan, from Lincolnshire, who came nine years back and fell in love with vanishing or hopeless Greek men, twice, began to talk the evil eye, but despite that tourist’s dream just to relax and take in the pointlessly beautiful light, still humans had to hurry on, as we do. As we sat there waiting, a man talked half a Kilo of plutonium, somewhere in Albania, if you only had the will, and the escaping sealions too, two years back, lured home to their enclosure by free fish. The boat got back at last and suddenly new meetings were broken by disappearing mopeds, hurrying home.People’s real lives.

So to AM Holmes and “This Book Will Save Your Life”, the last ten pages consumed over a half kilo of white and a little meze. If you want to fall in love with a writer, god forbid, read that very American but hugely touching book. Then look at the Pub photo in the back, so beautiful, so brave, though age changes everything. Such a work about human loneliness, but the vital attempt to connect, could only produce a desire to swim or drown. Splosh! How snorkels change the landscape, suddenly embedded with reeds and fish, breathing deeply, in an alien element. You drift back, pathetic in your vulnerability, escaping the sea, goggle-eyed, as if the encounter with the furriness of a rock on the shelving shore had changed anything. Perhaps it had, seeing in, because suddenly the bus back home was filled with real people. The manly, bald headed driver with a chip about driving a bus, the girl, suddenly challenged by the important ticket man, the sunset over the airport, where planes suggest anywhere else but this. AM Holmes makes you cry at the pain, and the pleasure of everything.

Personal articles about Tamar Brazis have been removed, because they make David Clement-Davies deeply unhappy and are no one else’s business. She was a person he cared for a great deal. As for the details about what happened in 2009, it is almost too difficult to speak and they have also been removed because they involve others. That will not stop David highlighting the scandal at the centre of Abrams and perjury before the New York Supreme Court. Perhaps he should try one more time to take that appeal on.