Maelstrom
Category: Writing and Poetry
If you catch the train from the small, west coast fishing town of Ayr to Glasgow, that fast growing city drawn in black ink, you pass close along the Newton Shore.
Off Newton beach there sits the wreck of a coal boat that has been there for as long as I can remember. She sank within a stones throw of land and, as far as I know, everyone on board when she foundered made it out alive. The story runs that she was stolen by the mate when he was drunk, and his attempt to sale her home ended in comical disaster.
At high tide all you can see is the top of her mast, reaching upwards towards the sky through cold, murky water. She sways with the tide and when the water is low you can look down inside the seaweed and barnacle encrusted stairs to the empty hold below. There’s no coal in her now; the people of Ayr made salvage within days of the sinking.
The town of Ayr enjoys the warming effects of the Gulf Stream – those hot waters that feed the hurricanes off the Gulf Coast of America.It is relatively balmy… for Scotland, of course
We have palm trees that try very hard to grow in the more sheltered gardens along the coast. They alway look a little apologetic to me, a little out of place, bright green tropical leaves under lowering, silver, water-sodden skies. I like them though. They are brave.
It rarely freezes hard on the south-west coast, and the snows that block the passes for months up north around Glen Coe and Lochailort occasionally dust Arran white, but seldom linger long. The salt in the air and those warm, nurturing, storm-feeding, treacherous gulf waters keep them at bay.
Ayr is a soft Shire with a hard, bloody history. Rabbie Burns, our national poet, grew up there, wrote his poets, dallied with his women, became the toast of Edinburgh society and died young. William Wallace stares sternly from his lofty seat in the tower on Ayr High Street; Stirling Bridge and Falkirk are both close by. Auld Ayr is a town of farms and sheep, cows and llamas. I have heard tell of ostrich farms too.
The town harbour used to be crowded with fishing boats and loud with fishermen talking and laughing: the gulls screaming as they fought for the guts and the heads of todays catch, and the occasional unguarded cod or mackerel. My dad told me a story of an unfortunate fisherman who lost a finger on the cold slab of the gutting table, first to a clumsy, careless moment and then to an agile and opportunistic seagull. May God strike me down it’s not a true story, said my dad. I believe him.
The Smugglers Bar still opens at five in the morning, but it is the late drinkers. the town jakies and the lads just off the night-shift from the local supermarket that drink there now, and not the newly on-shore.
Expensive flats look over the empty bay, out towards the beautiful island of Arran, lying supine in the Sound. The crowded fish-market, and the early dawn ruckus is long gone. Seagulls still circle hopefully above the clean concrete and the ruined walls of the ancient Viking fort, and the high hill-hewn profile of Arran and the empty market place stare at each other across the choppy sea.
We don’t see the snows too much, we don’t freeze too hard or too often in winter, and the summer days are long and welcoming, but then winter comes and in January and February we are lashed by the fierce living gales which rage for days on end. When the gales arrive, people go down to the beach in their cars to watch the storm waters. The high roaring waves crash white, blue and cloudy jade-green on the storm wall, and sometimes they cover the parked cars in frothing blankets of salt-seawater.
It is an amazing sight, although I am sure it cannot be good for the car engines.
Last year the storm-walls, which had held back the seas for so many years, were smashed to pieces. The battering waves picked up the huge stones which made the walls, and threw them across the shore lining fields. They broke windows in houses, they smashed cars, they put the fear of God into the house-holders along the beach, and now the old wall is gone and the sea can reach far inland.
Awesome, the casual damage inflicted by the sea water…in the true sense of the word.
Not too far from the sunken coal boat there stands the Lighthouse.
It’s not big, the Lighthouse, it’s not fancy and nobody mans it now, but it still throws its warning light into the roiling blackness of the January and February storms.
Sometimes, from the train window en-route to Glasgow, you can barely see it through the gleaming, iron-grey waters that batter and bash at its white-washed walls, storm winds blasting hard enough to toss salt water on the train window, over half a mile inland.
The storm-waves look like they are made from molten lead or mercury. They are silver and black, shredded by the wind into pale shining storm-caps. We call the storm-caps ‘white horses’ and herd after herd of these horses gallop landwards to leap over what is left of the storm wall, and break themselves against the cars, smashing against the stone houses and the cool, stoic, watchful fortress of the Lighthouse.
It makes the hair rise on your neck, the sound of that ocean.
Heard from the warmth of the train cabin it is faint, but still so full of casual, indifferent power. The crash, and the roar and whispering voices.
And still the Lighthouse stands.
And still the white horses keep coming…
MAELSTROM
We awake.
Five score fathoms down and coldly gleaming.
We stir.
And the cold, sullen waters recoil around us.
The weight of midnight oceans, heavy on our shoulders.
Chill fingers caress sleep flanks.
We slowly turn and twist, unquiet in our dreams.
All around us…
Enveloping. Cocooning. Secret velvet darkness.
The teeming Void.
Black depths. Never lit by dawn.
The inside of a dreamers eyes, studded with nightmare creatures. Monstrosities all aglow with unearthly light.
Impenetrable murk.
Luminous sequins.
Voracious appetites.
Slowly waltzing in an eternal dance of predatory death. Life eating life as we
slumber,
our ears pressed to the pulse of the world.
Distant thunder.
The sound invades our dreams.
Slow, deliberate hearts begin to beat,
to the rhythm of the tides.
Beat.
Ancient eyes turn towards the surface. Yearning.
Beat.
Beat.
Listen….
The Maelstrom calls us.
Rise! Rise!
Dance on the raging waves!
Fling the paean skywards.
And lead the storm to shore!
Limbs brace against the shadowy bed. Muscles coil under pale silk hides.
Push!
Upwards.
Scattering of stones, buried in a soft, silt shroud. Soaring into the eternal blackness.
Above and below us.
icy water and we, pale comets suspended in inner space.
Upwards.
Gathering speed.
Inky waters. The darkness gradually emptying and
filling with light, gilding sea-stained skin with dapples of gold and verdigris.
Incandescent in the gloom.
The Sound.
Siren sea-song. Rushing. Sibilance.
Murmuring past our ears as the light grows stronger. Brighter.
Stabbing and blinding us as we near the surface.
Roiling waters. Speeding our ascent.
Faster!
Amniotic waters fill with green light,
Faster!
The rumble of thunder.
Faster!
Crashing. Billowing waves.
They break
against each other, smashing into a million lightning-lit splinters.
Electric white,
Neon blue,
Luminously radiant
We no longer gleam,
We shine
and the sea catches fire around us as we explode through the surface.
Punching skywards
in a germination of frothing white foam. A flowering as fragile as ice held up to light.
Hard as the heart of evolution.
Surging around us, the Sea is
the flawed oily colour of archiac glass
hidden deep-drowned in sunken ships far below.
Rain falling
Sheet,
after sheet,
after sheet,
striking the heaving obsidian surface.
Perfect crystal beads
glittering momentarily in the storm light before
vanishing forever
amid the roar and the tumult of the elements.
Lightning flashes from cloud to cloud
charging the air. Electricity raises the fine hairs on our icy bodies.
Maddening us with
a thousand prickling kisses.
We are
the epicentre,
of a swirling whirlpool of shrieking wind and furious ocean
and we dance the razor edge between
the lashing waters and the crackling skies.
We turn our heads to the wind, baring our fangs.
The storm has us and hold us tight in a lovers embrace,
Backs arch
against the driving force of the living gale.
The wind
tears our manes into pale banners,
that catch the wounded light of the bruised heavens.
Illumination
sliding over our skins and carving our forms in
crashing water.
Promethial fire courses through our viens; ichor, countless aeons old.
We throw back our heads and scream
the battle-cry skywards.
Before
the first sea-born abandoned the oceans
we were.
The skies silent,
the desolate keening of the wind moving over still waters.
The stars blaze from the firmament and ours the only eyes to see them.
The aurora undimmed by land-locked light.
Now
Bitter eyes turn towards the coming shore.
There.
The Light-House.
Standing defiant on it’s salt-wave-battered, glistening rock.
Thread-bare beam, thin and brave,
swings
through raging storm, cutting a swathe through the deluge.
Our eyes reflect the illumination,
glowing
ember red in the darkness.
The Light-House.
Futile.
Fragile.
Guardian of the alien storm-tossed lives.
The indomitable Light-House, throwing it’s life-line into the raging storm.
Battling the roaring waters.
Defying lashing rain.
Refusing to abandon those held in thrall far out to sea.
Guiding them home.
We lash the sea to greater fury.
Dark waters
gather and surge,
wave after wave,
bearing us landward
as our fury rises and mists our minds blood-red.
We are here as we have always been and we remember.
We do not forgive, we do not forget.
We await our chance and we are always watching.
We live in the Seasons. The Encircling Waters of the World.
The synaptic voltage of the the Thunderbolt.
The Heart of the Maelstrom.
We reach the Light-House screaming
and,
rearing,
We smash our hooves against it!
Tags: Add new tag, Ayr, kelpies, Scotland, smugglers, storms, tugboats, white horses
