The Glass-hulled Boat
First come the jellyfish:
mauve-fringed, luminous bowls
like lost internal organs,
pulsing and slow.
Then in the green gloom
swaying sideways and back
like half-forgotten ancestors
– columns of bladderwrack.
It’s as though we’re stalled in a taxi
in an ill-lit, odd
little town, at closing time,
when everyone’s maudlin
and really, ought just to go
home, you sorry inclining
pillars of wrack, you lone,
vaguely uterine jellyfish
– whom I almost envy:
spun out, when our engines churn,
on some sudden new trajectory,
fuddled, but unperturbed.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2005. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2005 was Richard Price.
Editor’s comment:
Notice how near-rhyme is set up in the first two stanzas but not sustained – as the poem says, this really is a seascape that is a little bit drunken, where action soon seems hardly worth the effort; where the last stanza’s ‘churn’ and ‘perturbed’ can only rhyme in a befuddled wrong-consonant sort of way. I’m not so sure ‘whom’ is a word that much exists now except on paper but the lapse into archaic diction somehow over formalises the poem, again in a slightly squiffy and so highly appropriate way.
Author’s note:
…But really, what provokes poems, all poems, is the curious business of being in the world. We’re conscious, intelligent and organic, so how are we to live? How are we to conduct ourselves? Why does the world meet us with beauty and wonder? Why is there evil? What is our right response to stupidity and greed, especially our own? Will a poem about a flower suffice?
A tree house is a place where nature and culture meet, a sort of negotiated settlement, part reverie, part domestic, part wild. The book’s epigraph is from Hölderlin. The world may, or may not, be ending its lyric phase, but despite everything, ‘it is beautiful to unfold our souls and our short lives’.
Note: These are the closing two paragraphs from an essay by Kathleen Jamie about her collection The Tree House, from which the above poem is taken.
