Southern Edge: Three Stories in Verse - Softcover

Temperton, Barbara

9781921361418: Southern Edge: Three Stories in Verse

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1921361417 ISBN 13: 9781921361418

Publisher: Fremantle Pr, 2009

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Southern Edge comprises three compelling and dramatic stories in verse. 'The lighthouse Keeper's Wife', a tale of adultery and tragedy, we enter a woman's inner sensuous, alienated, and acutely sensitive. 'The Gap' - full of suspense and foreboding - reveals the troubled relationship of an edgy, brash and passionate young woman, Julz, and her farmboy husband. 'Jetty Stories' tells of a frightening and reckless journey across country, a flight from a bizarre and horrifying death by drowning. Southern Edge is an impressive performance by a poet with a gift for lyric poetry in full commence of her powers of description, narrative and characterisation.

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Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Southern Edge

Three Stories in Verse

By Barbara Temperton

Fremantle Press

The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife, 
The Gap, 
Jetty Stories, 
Acknowledgements, 
Sources for in-text quotations, 
Bibliography,

CHAPTER 1

The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife

Dawn.
There's still a bit of south in the wind.

Waves have worried the beach in two.
The keeper's wife collects driftwood, feathers.

There is something about the air,
the intensity of colour,
that awes her. This place is an X
on her map of moments with God.

Whales exhale beyond the wave line,
flippers and tail flukes slow-arc from the sea.

At the high tide line: cuttlefish, shells, kelp,
and a dead shearwater half-cast in sand,
wings mocked by breeze, the memory of flight.

Another bird, feet at pointe, Degas' ballet
framed by footprints of dogs and gulls.
Thereafter, another seven, bills locked mid-cry.

Mist begins its skyward drift with the sun,
horses and fierce riders
thunder through the curtain into day.

Sea's silver, molten,
the air taking on something like substance,
as though she could reach out, touch something solid.
She has either left the world
or just stepped into it.

II<

Cargo ships riding high in the water
sway on anchor chains — broad-hipped matrons
guarding the threshold of the channel.

On the rocks, two foxes hunt crabs, snails;
the vixen limps.

The keeper's wife has run away, again,
has gone as far as she can go, without a boat.

Halfway, she'd watched a yacht —
two men fighting canvas, ropes, the wind —
and the harbourmaster's red steam-launch
butting whitecaps, going nowhere.

Five cargo ships in the Sound today.

Salmon fishermen on the shore
battling nets, breakers, spray,
their voices drifting to her with seaweed
woven round a discarded hawser.

The fingers of God — sunlight through cloud —
seek out a pelican buoyed on the wind,
the guano-smeared beacons, crushed mussel shells.
The launch labours towards the harbour.
Aboard, the crew stand, their gaze intent
pon a tow-rope taut over tide change.
Five ships in the Sound. Five ships.
Sudden rush of fish onto hooks.
Five cargo ships.

Why must she always be working,
every moment extra-real,
the world so other-worldly, separate?
Can't she just sit? Enjoy rocks, wind, sea,
because they're rocks, wind, sea,
not to be turning to watch
the launch tow an upturned yacht,
to see one man astern,
apart,
see that man shivering.

III

Her bed linen was knotted when she woke,
but dawn was soft:
clouds, teased to string, evaporating,
the scrub adorned with broken branches,
breeze fretting at battered leaves.

The keeper's wife conjured
a storm in her sleeping,
funnelled it through her open window
into the night, scattering whirlwinds
like silver gulls across the Sound,
wreckage onto the rocks.

IV

Dog dances round lichen-lipped pools.

Startled sea-lions shed their sea-slicked grace,
retreat to barnacle embellished ledges.
The woman watches while her husband
and semi-pelagic children swim.

Two years, he'd said.
Three daughters and twelve years later,
her sense of another season turning over
is as sharp as the