Mansion Beach

Andrew Macara

Mansion Beach

1

I count the rays of the jellyfish:

twelve in this one, like a clock to tell time by,

thirteen in the next, time gone awry.

A great wind brought them in, left them here

to die, indifferent time measured by whirling moon

and sun, by tides in perpetual fall and rise.

Englobed, transparent, they litter the beach,

creatureless creatures deprived of speech

who spawn more like themselves before they die.

I peer into each and see a faceless

red center, red spokes like a star.

They are, and are not, like what we are.

2

At noon, in the too bright light, watchful,

looking too hard, we saw the scene turn dark

and lost the children for a moment, waves

crashing around them. Shadow blended with shadow,

the sun inside a cloud, and then the children

were restored to us, our worst fears a hallucination.

All afternoon their castles, poor and proud,

rose and fell. Great civilizations were built,

came to an end, the children mighty lords, their castles

only as small as we are to the stars and starry structures.

The day was infinite for them, time stretching

to the farthest horizon, the sun their overlord.

But how to reconcile these summer days washing away

with our need to commemorate, to hold onto?

They knew. And so they sang a song tuneless and true,

admitting no fixed point, no absolute, words

overheard and blurred by great winds blowing in,

a rhyme or round for a time such as we live in:

The world is made, knocked down, and made again!

3

This is the moment of stasis: gulls stall

above the burned-out mansion on the bluff,

gone for thirty years, and cairns rise up,

stone balanced on stone. By evening, the beach

is empty, my shadow a long-legged giant leading me

past small battlements to the day’s masterpiece:

a dripping castle, all towers and crenellation,

tall as a child, made by many children, flying

three-pointed flags that wave hopefully in the wind.

Closer, I see the moat, the courtyard’s secret

pool in which, macabrely, red jellyfish float,

death and potentiality entwined forever.

A crab small as my fingernail, dead,

perfect in every detail, with hairlike spinnerets

and claws, guards the open castle door from entry

as night begins to fall and shadows dark as ink

wash in to stain the beach. Shivering, I think,

O sentry, who would enter here?

4

Traveling once, I stood under the open sky

inside a great unfinished cathedral.

Stonemasons, there for generations, clung

like ants to thin scaffolding, carving

griffins and saints, the rising spires and portals

dripping like hot wax, and birds flew

freely in and out of lacy walls, like angels

thrown down from heaven. Gaudy and grand,

it was a vision of eternal mind. Its maker,

dead for a long time, had left no finished plan,

design, but work went on, days turning

into years, the century coming to a close.

In disbelief, I touched each twisting vine

and leaf, marveling at what had been done,

and what was yet to be, and wished,

as I wish now, O let it never be complete!

Elizabeth Spires

I was struck by the contrast between this and the poem “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire” by Gerard Manley Hopkins (my last post). They both speak of the constant change in nature; Hopkins marks it in the clouds - “an air-built thoroughfare”, Spires in the ocean – “tides in perpetual fall and rise”. Spires goes on to talk of “indifferent time”, how the sandcastles of the children on the beach “rose and fell”, “castles only as small as we are to the stars”. She points to the lifeless bodies of the jellyfish littering the sand, “creatureless creatures…faceless”, “they are, and are not, like what we are”. She captures the ache of passing time exquisitely. The futility of our endeavours. “How to reconcile these summer days washing away with our need to commemorate, to hold onto?” Hopkins speaks of stars also, “Manshape, that shone sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out…” Both poets come up against a horrifying sense of erasure, of extinguishment. Spires writes of how there seems to be “no fixed point, no absolute, words overheard and blurred by great winds blowing in”, while Hopkins asks if anything surives “but vastness blurs and time beats level”? For him the “world’s wildfire, leave but ash”, and “all is in an enormous dark, drowned”. It’s a moment of despair. How they both absorb and live with their observations is facinating; Hopkins shouts “Enough!” and turns to the arms of his Saviour who promises resurrection and immortality, while Spires pleads that the cycle of fall and rise, the building of castles and cathedrals never be complete, never come to an end. Is there a design to this life? Is there a pattern that does not end in death and darkness? Both poems ask this question vividly.