Sixteen years ago this week the Boscastle flood occurred. The two villages of Boscastle and Crackington Haven in Cornwall suffered extensive damage after flash floods caused by an exceptional amount of rain that fell over eight hours on the afternoon of Monday 16 August 2004.The flood in Boscastle was filmed and extensively reported but the floods in Crackington Haven and Rocky Valley were not mentioned beyond the local news. The floods were the worst in local memory. [The above partially from Wikipedia].

 

The window was open

hundreds of balls of grey spit

smashed a scratched dashboard

and the car became swamp.

I ran out, through, up

into the place where the landmines

were, remembering the story;

walking be-socked on polished lintel

a crash of china, chipboard

and then the concave knee.

All doors were closed to me

behind them I could hear other rain

sounds, cisterns emptying and filling

and swells of thunder in the

rolled-up rugs and blare of the Dysons.

I ran down, through, out

and settled myself over Sudoku

revelling in the white space

between running lines.

 

The grey tapestry through every

field glass, and cannon of

high tide patrolled in turn. I watched

through the wing-mirror the day

drift through noon, as inland

streams turned to cascade, valleys

paying for delivery of their

Atlantic harvest, scattering the

dirt-thick marrow of August

through fence, gate and field.

And there, below, the applause

of young gulls, now kept back

edged out on the emmets' landing;

shingle platforms in tiers of four

submarines of rockpool and abandoned

bucket, there they huddled

inside the oldest houses;

nets and tilted sand, damp, carpet

echoes; sardined rows of fever-faces...

 

"Young man, this is where I leave 'e";

I remember the heavy boots on rock

the stamp of feet through the hole

in the next harbour, without

a lamp, the ancient slab of man

trudged solid into darkness.

Old rumours bled through broken wires

of miles and miles of caves, connected

from Isaac to 'barwith to right up there

in Trevena, heady with drips, so many

soft white shapes in hard black space.

If the day turned foul you'd sense

every one would flood;

I'd sit and watch, from the private beach

hundreds of pairs of clogs wash

out, ripped sodden leather

pale-faded in the tumult.

Dead men's fingers littering

at diagonals, the nowhere of paradise.

 

The television forever drones

fuzz-footage, slow-moving figures.

Our first hand-waves of dismissal

at some distant, Caribbean peril

gave way to mirrors held up

to the coast; we saw the convergence

wading in brown torrents, open sewers

awash with tree, motor, drywall;

ants clustered on sloped slates

hugging chimneys; rotors

on all sides, cries in receivers.

Out to sea with capsized jeeps

and trapped goods, none dared follow;

from one coast to the other, the

fire-lit memories, out, again OUT, and

watered down in blinks of eyes.

Huddled in the oldest houses

four centuries erased, trapdoors

in ceilings, learning to fly.

 

It still moves, we still move

through years of bitter geography.

We've kept the star-signs

to the paper and the lessons to

record; but no-one listens to us

and no-one listens at all.

We are walking on the path

of most resistance, acknowledging

crowded beaches and filing

knives for future revolutions.

At forty-thousand feet, with

black sails floated from the moors

another myth has become us.

Maybe my heart is a peninsula

the weight of history on one side;

the continued cold-shock

of existence, painted on the other.

Perhaps, we will soon become inured

our past the walls, our future water.