By: Dan Bavister

Dreaming the Wreck

She worries not that the water may
Reflect her gaze – she only cares
For the deep cool of swaying water weeds,
Of shells all marbled in the coursing flow,
The many gardens of the tide pools.

A small blue crab traces its happy path
Between the cornices of clam shells,
Dropped lobster claws, insectile eyes
Lost, glaring vacant from the sands.
She catches her eyes in the water –
Small blue opals broken by the rolling
Milkflow of waves shattered into foam.
She smiles into that broken tapestry
Of surface, marred by refracting light,
Barring or obscuring her view down.

She dives into the deep.
The water charges by,
Small flocks of fish bursting into colour
Radiant as the dawn,
Moonshine scales breaking.
The space is all the sound of water.

She had dreamed the wreck before she saw it
Imagining its furred moss of seaweed
Gathering all into its busted mast,
Its hull all worn with its corollary of shells –
Broken beams, dark piscine visages peering out.

Therein she found those skeletal voyagers –
The captain still standing deckside
His bones frozen into place,
His hand outstretched, the bone white and sharp.
Those empty eyes of his seem forlorn,
As if still he grieves his drowned crew,
His wife and child away back home,
Those friends of his with whom he wishes to while
Away another afternoon of sun on glass and laughter
Echoing through the vaulted heights of shipyard inns
All full of golden sunshine and dark beer
Now lost to slow erosion of salt and brinewind.
This place is still as haunting to her now as it was
When she first dived here; she leaves the harrowing space.

Breton Wilderness

She knows this is likely the last time she’ll see
This Breton shore, with its blue oak trees
Lining that deep and purple sea.
The sands here are soft, the skies pale and wrought
By the recent rain in such a way
That in the sky’s hanging grey
She could not tell if it were dusk or dawn.
Her hair is sunlit by the last ghostly rays
Of sunbeams through the mossy, dreaming woods.
Children play there, in the midst of the supple light
While the old man plays his harmonica and cries
A long sad sorry tale, of a faraway sea
Across from these haunted shores, where the sands
Were white as brilliant day, and hawks,
Eyes golddark in the noonday, surveyed
So many isles as could cross an ocean.

Calling back, the saltdark sea cries to her;
She sees among its colonnades of surf
So many faces as a crowd:
There is an aspect of the elegy to this grey light,
These blue oaks, these purple seas and skies,
The shoreline strewn with dark black kelp.
Above, between her and the sunstruck heaven vault
She sees an owl, with downy wing, and clawed feet,
Its goldshine beak a scythe to cut the air with.
Still in the forest the old man whiles his time,
The music rises; the children splash in the coursing stream.
That water blooms with golden fish,
With beady eyes that spy the riverside.
On their backs are patterns of the deity:
Soft yellow veins, goldcourses, that show the rippling
Sinews of their backs;
Above, still the owl looks on
With eyes that should know only dark
Yet see: the golden shore and sands and skies,
The fish, all gold, their eyes frightened at the sight
Of gleaming claws goldblack.
This is a dreaming shore.

In the Night

When you wake in the night
To the least sound of rainsteps
Pattering on the oak of your house
You think of your small garden –
The royal blue roses clambering over
Smooth stonework, the gilt
Of daffodils that rings around
The old well, the vacant swing,
The rusted bandstand,
The summer house without a birdcall.

Your house is by far the finest
In all the sleepy Hampshire village
You have called your home these past
Forty years – ever since you and her
Moved out of the city,
To this quiet expanse of dreamriver,
Water meadow, small russet fields
All patchworked with purple hills.

Your grandfather knew these fields.
He painted them in oils – faint filigrees
Or ochre hues, lustrous sables, moonbeam
Whites lit like faerie wedding dresses.
He shaded in the bruised hills and richer
Blues of verdant plains as if they were his eyes,
Azure eyes – and bound about the skies
With cotton-shaped clouds shaded pinkishly.

You stir in your bed and observe the rafters –
They are grained with so many curves or turns
As troubled seas, all laden with stormstrife,
Rippled and edgeways or longways rift
With drops or spurls of balled-up wood
As so many islands in the South Seas.

Your mind makes an archipelago of the night:
Last and first canvas of the deity –
Then back.
Back in the room in your mind in your moment.
You wish you hadn’t given so much time
To that job in the city you hated.
You wish you’d written a sad sorry tale of
Your broken body – if only to smile at the telling.

A Visit to London

Still dazed from the flight, she looks out
Across the Thames, all lit in the lamplight
To see Big Ben, in silhouette
Obscured behind some high mountains
Of mist.

She was born in the woods near Kherson
Beside a river from which
Her father would pull fish still steaming
From that dark abyss.
He would read her books about the flowers
That grew in the near hills
Or the trees growing in the forests.

When she was ten she went to see a ballet
In Kyiv – The Nutcracker,
With a Russian playing the lead.
She thought nothing of that then.
She remembers dabbing her tears from her eyes.

She admires that coursing Thames
All black, yet lit by amber lamplight;
The cars swish past, puddles break.
She closes her eyes –
She can hear the forest once more.
She is running towards her grandmother’s house;
The brambles snag her ankles.
She stumbles into a ditch.
Wet mud.

She opens her eyes
And is surprised to see the Parliament
Is now right in front of her.
She must have walked there in a daze.

She clutches her speech in her pocket.
She must memorise every line.
Is there time?
She thinks of the frontline –
Of the gun smoke burning in her nose.
She thinks of the trees –
Those cathedrals of natural space,
Of golden and green light.
London is nothing like she imagined.

A First Night in England

She wakes into the middle of the night
When the rain trills among the listless trees
That guard her small cottage on the edge
Of that old English estate – all glorious
In its sedentary pomp.
She must be at least forty,
Though there is something of the faërie
To her wan look, her pensive gaze
That would not seem out of place
In one of the picture-books of her youth.

She walks out into the night.
Her dress sways in the summer breezes,
Moving like the gossamer moss
That binds the higher trees –
The oaks, and the sycamores,
The leaves all patterned in moonshine,
Gilded as Chamois heights of snows on snows.
Her face is silver in the glow
Of starshine lingering there
While the slow winds trace their palms
Against her teared face –
Her mascara runs black in rheumy grace.

Such sublime gardens has she never seen.
This palace – fortress without a tsar,
Place of pomp, wondrous in its art –
Seems vacant now. Gone are the parties
In these blue gardens.
Gone are the peacocks calling with sombre
Low – gone are the curlews twisting in summer skies.

She smudges the tears from her eyes and settles
Her lone gaze upon the rustic face
Of a centaur, caught in the cold illumination.
His face, too, is teared –
Eyes forlorn, as a mother without a child.
She cannot bear his contorted face,
Gazing there in that tucked-away clearing.
She promises to her herself to never return.
Later, in the night, she writhes and turns in
Restless motion – she thinks of the gardens,
Though most of all, she holds in her heart
Her mascara running in that songless clearing.

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Dan Bavister is an emerging poet from Dorset. His doctoral research in English Literature at the University of Oxford explores coastal Romanticism and the maritime imagination of Herman Melville. His poetry is rooted in landscape, memory, folklore, and the enduring relationship between people and place.