Tim Cresswell
Newfoundland

A woman in St John’s
said she liked my scarf
in a chock-full bookshop,
called Afterwords. It’s a thing
to get shit-faced on George Street.
A band called “Quaker Parents”
plays at The Ship. People sound Irish.
The cod have long gone
but now there’s oil.
There is dark rock, thick fog
and thin soil. To belong
for a while out-of-towners
can drink screech, kiss a cod
and repeat after them
“deed I is me ol’ cock,
and long may your big jib draw”.

I can’t count the times I’ve flown over
sleepless, beat, following
the blue plane on the moving map
on the seatback. Thirty-one thousand feet,
counting down miles between
New York, Chicago, Boston
and London.

In December, zero degrees,
unlikely clear blue sky, I’m driven
past the jellybean homes
to Cape Spear. Sea churns froth against
the rocks, a hollow-eyed
bunker stares down the grey Atlantic,
two lighthouses, one old,
one new. My local companion
recites the names of capes and coves–
Portugal Cove. Cuckold Cove.
Quidi Vidi. Cape Despair.
He speaks of moose on Water Street,
synclines, anticlines, short tailed weasels,
iron mines, the comforting absence of bears.
Back past Signal Hill, across the barrens
and into the boreal forest,
four, five, six white trails of planes
flying straight, in loose formation,
following an aerial highway west.

_ _

Tim Cresswell is a geographer and poet who has been widely published in poetry magazines in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the USA and Canada including The Moth, Rialto, North, Magma, Poetry Wales, Agenda, Envoi, Riddlefence and The Kudzu House Quarterly. His first collection, Soil , was published by Penned in the Margins (London) in July 2013. His second poetry book-a book-length sequence set in Svalbard called Fence-will be published in 2015. He is also the author of five books on the themes of place and mobility including, most recently, Place: An Introduction (Blackwell 2014).

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