Bald Head

Bald Head

Out here, the cairns have purposes:
they prop up whitewashed sticks
as way-markers where the path
traverses bare granite, or serve
as monuments to walkers past
who diverted from the trail, grasped
abrasive stones in sweaty palms
and bade them balance. You might
quarry cairnstones from over there,
where boulders have the power
of replication: custom-made
to be carried to that rise, under
the lizard-stunning sun. Here,
the limestone takes over, like
calcareous roots, branching
into sand. The path turns precipitous;
descending it makes cascades,
and you think how, on your return,
every upward step will subside
straight back down the hill. Beyond,
there is a giant’s playground:
humpbacked lumps of stone,
and sandpits, great eroded channels,
and biting flies licking forelegs
in the heat. Vistas of islands
and other great headlands open
around you; the sea perfectly
waveless, the air uncannily
windless, until the Head looms
ahead of you, and you pick your way
from cairn to cairn. And then there is
suddenly no more stone: it falls away
into pure ocean, and someone – or
is it more than one? – has piled another
cairn, as if to say: Ocean, you’ve not yet
quite conquered this prodigious dome
of silica; when the storms come, pound
away. Grind the great Bald Head
to perfect, blemishless sand; sweep
it in to Goode Beach and Frenchman Bay.
And the ocean says, once this was
an island, but I changed my mind.
I raise lands just as often as I grind
them down. So you say, I admit it,
ocean: you have made and you have
taken away. I promise I won’t stay long.
Let me stand before this cairn in vain,
say a prayer, and add a single stone.

Poem by Giles Watson, 2015.