For Granddad

My Granddad was a fishmonger in South Devon, driving to Exeter every morning to pick up a van full of fresh fish which he would then drive around the villages around his home town of Newton Abbot - homely, soft named villages, Bovey Tracey, Kingskerswell, Daccombe.

He always seemed somewhat aloof to me as a child, yet he became oddly approachable when overtaken by dementia towards the end of his life, kissing my father goodbye on my last visit to him - something he would never have done when in full control of his faculties.

I've taken some liberties with reality in this poem - I pictured him growing up in some seaside fishing village, somewhere like Robin Hood's Bay or Clovelly - not really true... And actually his afternoons were spent at his allotment.  So this poem is "for" him ather than strictly about him....

When the man first became a boy

he would sit, he said, on the old sea wall

where the village road spilled out onto the shingle

and the ocean filled his eyes.

He’d count the smacks -

out then in -

watching their weight in the water

as they rounded home into the harbour’s open arms.

And on high spring tides, he’d war his way

down to the sea’s fuming brink

and watch as it rocketed up against the grey -

wave upon wave of the ocean’s battalions,

assaulting the windows,

bloodying the doorsteps

of the town’s first houses.

Stuck in the snow... my granddad.

As a man, he caught the sea all unawares.

He’d slop it in pails and

fillet and fling it into

the open back of his van.

And off down yellow roads he’d sail it.

Home again for lunch

with salt and scales on his hands

and the last fish eyes glazed and dimming.

In the afternoon,

the woman would sit on the shore

and watch him wrestle the waves -

the confusion

of white skin in the surf.

I’ve seen the tide turn -

the man is a boy again.

An ocean has left him drowning on the beach.

The arteries have hardened round his heart.

The brine has bleached the colour from his creaking gills.

I hear the shifting of a thousand pebbles

as he breathes -

in then out -

and the salt sea

steals from his rheumy eye.