Hirtles Beach Metonymy by Michael Goodfellow

February 10, 2022
Poem name: Hirtles Beach Metonymy Poet name: Michael Goodfellow Poem begins: That night with you rock ground to sand —barrows of dented quartz, pyrite, granite and slate wave hammered against the torn hill. Their dulling made a beach: the salt bleached log where we sat, the marsh that swallowed light, dune grass where horses grazed, sea the mouth’s dark of a kiss, water flush to the sky. The moon rose behind us, an animal staring out of the brush. The thick, you called it. You had other words for things, you tongued them out, letting them shape in the air, then dampen: sand the colour of bark, how night was the green of a burned forest, how years make loss leaf out, then bloom. There roots still clutch rocky ground. Silt fills the channel. Each summer the brackish lagoon drains to its tacky bottom. True or false, that night you mouthed them all, turning them over, the names for stones. End of poem. Credits: Copyright © Michael Goodfellow Forthcoming in Naturalism: An Annotated Bibliography by Michael Goodfellow (Gaspereau Press, Spring 2022). Michael Goodfellow’s first poetry collection, Naturalism: An Annotated Bibliography is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press this spring. His poems have appeared in Bear Review, The Dalhousie Review, CV2, Prairie Fire, The Nashwaak Review, The Cortland Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Measure Review, Matter, Reliquiae and elsewhere. He lives in Nova Scotia.