Sinéad Morrissey: Rock Pool

These creatures live on faith that the greater sea,
whose roaring pounds and permeates the rock pool's floor,
the rock pool's leather-bound sanctuary, will once again rise up
to the little sea and that their salts will mingle and hold.
My arm submerged is a Eucalyptus tree
in an eighteenth-century birthing room, lurid and luminous.

How the women who have blocked the keyholes
and the door jams with rags and snuffed the candles scurry!
They move as suddenly as the travelling specks of eyes
that haunt vision: one look at them and they're gone
but they still look on. Water pours from the raised fringe
of green gauze like generosity. The pool collects itself again.

These creatures have lodged themselves on the tallest ridge
of the law of averages, the law of probability, and on the memory
of what their ancestors learned and saw, as unswayably
as they swell in crevices and suck rocks. Life flourishes on belief –
it announces quietly how, some day or night, the sea will arrive and save them
from the starfish-seeking children and evaporation.

How they would shine in a parable on the return of Christ.
How they would give women succour, those who also hang on
for the moon to peak and for water to answer. A stick breaks but does not break
as it enters the mirror. When I bend to the surface the room underwater
clouds and furrows with breath like a door closing over.
I am not theirs and they will not give me up.


From Between Here and There (2002). A magnificent many-layered poem that uses the rock pool - a starting-point both minute and primal - to explore the full range of human otherness. The successful daring of the image of an arm as "a Eucalyptus tree in an eighteenth-century birthing room" marks the point at which the poem takes off to become something sustained and remarkable.