Night Photograph Read online

  14 by the absolute stillness

  15 that comes only with not knowing

  16 how fast you are going. As you fall

  17 in orbit around the earth, remember

  18 your language. Listen to star dust.

  19 Trust your fear.

  Suspension

  1 Two hundred and forty-five feet above the mud,

  2 I play with the story of the bridge's construction.

  3 How Brunel, in his early twenties,

  4 was a half-drowned invalid hiding in Bristol,

  5 looking for a way to win back faith

  6 after the collapse of his tunnel under the Thames.

  7 I curl over the railings, unable to grasp

  8 the push-and-pull dynamics of Brunel's success,

  9 a puzzle for my building-brick perceptions.

  10 He used secondhand chains to hold up a seven-

  11 hundred-foot span. He was a sick man.

  12 It is safer to look away from the light

  13 and test the vertigo that comforts those

  14 who come here to die. It is a popular spot

  15 and the road below has to be protected

  16 by a shelf described as a ‘body stop’.

  17 I stay on the bridge, laugh at its ghosts,

  18 make jokes about accident and suicide;

  19 then I start to accept Brunel's equation,

  20 the simplicity holding it all in place.

  21 Now it looks too easy, I can't go on,

  22 my sense of balance is suddenly lost

  23 along with my ignorance, the framework of

  24 the physics of what keeps us from falling.

  Night Photograph

  1 Crossing the Channel at midnight in winter,

  2 coastline develops as distance grows,

  3 then simplifies to shadow, under-exposed.

  4 Points of light—quayside, harbour wall,

  5 the edge of the city—

  6 sink as the surface of the night fills in.

  7 Beyond the boat, the only interruption

  8 is the choppy grey-white we leave behind us,

  9 gone almost before it is gone from sight.

  10 What cannot be pictured is the depth

  11 with which the water moves against itself,

  12 in such abstraction the eye can find

  13 no break, direction or point of focus.

  14 Clearer, and more possible than this,

  15 is the circular horizon.

  16 Sea and sky meet in suspension,

  17 gradual familiar textures of black:

  18 eel-skin, marble, smoke, oil—

  19 made separate and apparent by the light

  20 that pours from the sun on to the moon,

  21 the constant white on which these unfixable

  22 layers of darkness thicken and fade.

  23 We are close to land, filtering through

  24 shipping lanes and marker buoys

  25 towards port and its addition of colour.

  26 There is a slight realignment of the planets.

  27 Day breaks at no particular moment.

  © Copyright Lavinia Greenlaw, 1993, reproduced under licence from Faber and Faber Ltd