Perhaps there is more than one way of loving the world, Miss Agar.
Perhaps you are right.
I am booting lonely stones on Perranporth Beach as I struggle with this letter
late this morning by the hunting sea.
I apologise again for that silliness with the shark.
My memory has fixed a photograph of you
smearing blood from above your cut lip
inadvertently down and over your mouth.
So a tiny red haze of cloud blurs above the pad as I sketch,
drawing from the touch of things and from memory.
I am working on a half-landscape of plates which are suns
and the flanks of hills too, quartered.
Near my fingertips this morning
were the cups and bottles on my kitchen table.
I’m doing this, Miss Agar – I want to tell you this, despite my error –
because I am hesitant about the world.
Perhaps I don’t, as you said, love the world at all
and design only altars that spurn worship
and colour them white and call them something else.
That blue-on-darker-blue Biting Sea you once gave me
I have still. Always, even if I close my eyes,
the sound about me all the time is the pursuing,
shushing, jabbing sea
that smooths a hand towards me
and rubs itself out.
