Hugh Greasley is a poet and painter who uses landscapes as a means of exploring landscapes, people and memory. Explorations can be about such things as sunlight falling into a shed or the experience of visiting a wreck on a Cornish beach at night in the teeth of a gale.
Hugh also works as a visual artist, painting in oils and has had a scientific education, culminating in a degree in Chemical Engineering. He has published seven collections of poetry.
Tide Clock
A tide clock sits
on my kitchen wall
set to the flows of a distant place.
I stir porridge when the harbour is full
folding in a brown wash of cinnamon
while maybe a path of sunlight bisects a bay
and fishing boats are setting to sea
dots hauling themselves to a horizon.
I break cool salad leaves
for an early lunch
when the sea is falling
may be leaving the scripture of seaweed
across a storm beach.
I mark the time of low tide
with a cup of coffee
when the steamship boilers
by the island rocks
may be dancing in heavy surf.
When the sea is returning
I cook Courgettes
turning the slight golden disks
while maybe thin lips of surf are trickling from
one sand ripple to another
re-ordering thin black lines of wreck coal
across a beach.
I take only a rhythm
no stone is picked from a beach
or sea gull’s feather found
in the sand of a road corner
or battered oyster shell
eased from a tide pool.
I also have a tideclock
in my head and it is set to you
the rhythms of your walk along a quay
stepping over the frayed mooring ropes
of the heavy brush of a bag of fish
against your thighs
as you walk up cemetery hill
surf boiling on a beach below you
of the lungfuls of spring air
taken through your lips
of your heart slowly beating faster
as you rise up a road
between granite cottages
only to fall as you spin
and look over a sunlit bay
and gannets turning in a wind.
Hugh Greasley