Two poems written at De La Warr Pavilion during ArchiTEXT week.
Tea Dance
At the De La Warr Pavilion
And in the fading afternoon
among frayed chairs, the teacups and the palms
as evening draws in across wet
shingle
like a gathering in of grief, he glides
in nifty patent pumps to Nobby Clarke’s
Moon River, forgets as they twirl across
the polished floor her knitted
cardie
and thickened thighs, the Oxfam silver shoes,
remembering only, how once, in
a trick
of shifting light, halted midway on the curve
of foyer stairs, he imagined
his tongue
licking salt from her bare shoulder, lifting
the scalloped edge of her blouse
behind
the empty bandstand as a June wind
blew in from a zinc-white sea.
Outside the dimming window beyond
the balcony, balustrade and strand
louche boys in shades lounge on blue deck
chairs
like passengers going down on the Titanic,
pink tulips, petals tattered as
ball gowns,
tilt party faces towards the mewing gulls
their necks snapping in the harsh
west wind.
And still she feels beautiful as she leans
her heavy body into his three-beat
steps
holding close that night when the moon
snuggled down over the breakwater as
they sheltered
in the lee of the Pavilion’s curved window,
passengers on a liner to a
Newfoundland.
For these days time hangs
heavy as nostalgia in this life of bedding plants,
tea on the white veranda.
So is this… my Huckleberry friend…
as he guides her…1.2.3…across
the darkening
floor what love is, this enduring, this
taking another step? For still she
feels danger flutter
like the red bathing flag he once raised for her
on the flagpole of his heart.
De La Warr Pavilion
Bexhill-on-Sea
I do not know which to prefer
the light windy blue of morning
or the white-out of sea mist,
the inflection of shadow at dusk
or the spill of light from the pavilion windows
blurring the dark of the vacant shore.
Sea becomes tin, iron,
a bale of lilac silk ruffled
by afternoon wind
as weather mutates, shifts like a mood,
ectoplasmic fog turning to wide
clear sky.
A film of rain, a white gull,
a wet dog; everything
flux and shift
a formation and refiguring
between sea, sky
and deck-chaired strand
where light is hazy,
chromatic, mutable
here on the edge of this watery world
© Sue Hubbard