THE MIDDLE DEEPS

Lesley Harrison

               “Never before had such a thing happened – and then it did.”
                                                                              Maria Stepanova, Holy Winter 20/21.

There was a bird, and there was a whale, and they lived in the deep blue sea.

The bird had a temporary home
at the last rough edges of the continent

arriving in Spring, fleeting over waves
on the oars of its wings, flashing this way and that

now catching the updraft
now cluttering ledges in a rank peck and foul,

in a squalor of frequencies,
necking and braying all afternoon

high on its airy ledge, the sea below
splintering and sinking, splintering and sinking.

The whale pilots the
old sea roads, pitching and sounding

its creeks and tolls
till the floor of the world falls way
                                                        here, he croons :

chirruping in speech marks
like wood blocks like frogs like runes

or twining notes, bird-like,
hanging songs across the abyss

making room and distance
each call / response

each question a drop into darkness.

On high days they meet
in a cold boil of air and smoking water

gannets falling                 at difficult angles
the whale sinking to the surface, loud as a breath

all querulous, rain-hungry
all swimming at the speed of life

and herring sile – a vast, fluid sundial  –

It happened slowly, then all at once.

the sea segmented, chambered
into corridors and
tight, small rooms

the sea dense with thud, thud, thud
floorswells, unsynchronised
isobars of ultra / infra

drowning and screening
old byways and sink holes and
upwelling currents of

flickering krill,
squid and squall reforming
in the blank spaces

in wrong constellations,
like snow on water
there / not there

Imagine an ocean :

the gannets, loquacious, long winded
arriving in shifts from the middle deeps, their flight paths in kilter

the whales with their local sounds
the whales bearing out and down, their fine-tuned echolalia

finding nothing and everything :
stories of phosphorescent fish

imperative drifts of plankton and sharp-edged krill
and squid swimming, hand in glove ;

imagine twisting
through galleries of rain and green, in and out of troughs

like white darts, like low hills                                          whale sound       bird-strike 

the whole limbic system swelling in their wake   –

Lesley Harrison lives on Scotland’s north-east coast, and in her poetry and prose she records its layers of occupation, its languages and its deep, ancient orientation towards the north. Her writing takes place among the soundscapes, migration routes, relics and settlements of the North Atlantic rim, and asks how our experience of these is thinned or altered in this age of sudden change. The whale recurs throughout her writing as a reminder of the real proximity of the marvellous. Lesley has held residencies in Iceland, Greenland and Svalbard, and is a member of the North Sea Poets collective.