Geri Doran
Two POEMS
Fireside
Is this where we seek and find our Lord?
The many in the one, and all of them, or Him, flickering away
in the little brick-cell, the cupola of fire?
Beyond the portico windows, the false dark of winter night
manifests nothing kin to presence. Blue-ribbed night chinked
into rectangles is merely vacancy arrayed. Tree lights
wink in the corner in a diffusion of color—perhaps?
But no, for confidantes there are only these crisp, orange flames
backed by blackened brick.
Reverie is no gossamer thread to spin, and flame-light’s no answer.
The fire dries the air, and what divinity, self-respecting,
could abide an aridness such as this? We are all
bone-dry, even the cats, even the feral one mewing at the door.
This is winter, could that be our answer? The cold,
the cracked skin, lack of angels in the house? Light’s false
as dark, and no more tenanted, despite these spirited shapes.
Cassiterite
Tin veins the flat, underfoot rock: two thin black lines
bordering a whitish, cloudy strip. Between tussocks of weed,
in a cutway through the valley, its fog-slippery sheen is nothing,
two strands not worth a penny. Below, deep in the mine tunnels,
the streak of mineral cassiterite appeared blue, its color sweated
from the seeping rock into the visible, then drilled,
hammered, labored in small backbreaking boulders
up to the surface. Three-quarter ton of ore
to yield an ingot of tin, stamped from the stone
by pestle, by steam engine, shaken, separated, weighed, smelted,
then stamped again with the Lamb and Flag,
Cornish tin for transport.
Near St. Agnes Head, north in the Coastal lode, are hills of blue.
Shoals of pebble—discards, in burrow heaps—still cast their
gray-blue tint on the grassy slopes. And miners’ footways
lay beaten into the ground: a network of paths crisscrossing down
Blowing House Hill to the old stream works. There past
the tin exhibition centre, past the roofless, grievously cracked
stone wall and plank-topped windows of the Blue Hills
engine house, streambed met ocean at Trevellas Porth,
and there the earliest miners scavenged tin at water’s edge.
Four thousand years of tin, then the last mine closed.
Ghosted, history flecks the land: chimneys, disintegrating engine houses
and, hidden in long grasses, the circular ironwork covers that bar
descent into caving ground-ways. From the cliff top near Pendeen,
you can see the red-brown burnished soils of Geevor’s old arsenic works,
then squat Levant, and in mind’s eye beyond that Botallack,
the Crowns perilous on the crags above a pristine, blue Atlantic—
my mines, I’ve come to think of them, though what more to say
eludes me. Here on my desk, in another country, in a vial
bought in a museum shop, the sample of tin dioxide
is black spackled silvery brown. The museum’s display
of rock mineral and unglazed tile showed chalky trails:
black cassiterite scratched on ceramic goes white:
the color of powdered tin.
And this wall photographed near the mineshaft’s headgear, this roadside
wall, is gray galvanized by green, like leaf-shadowed lichen;
in stark white, the handwriting stands clear. It is a single, unbroken
line, and I picture it reaching from the ancient stream works
here to South Crofty mine, closed 1998, and beyond,
through the breached and sullied land, to haunt the future’s edges:
Cornish lads are fishermen, and Cornish lads are miners too,
but when the fish and tin are gone what are the Cornish boys to do?
Geri Doran is the author of two poetry collections, Sanderlings (Tupelo Press, 2011) and Resin (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), which received the Walt Whitman Award. Recent honors include fellowships and residencies from the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, Can Serrat, and Maison Dora Maar. Of “Cassiterite,” she writes: “the graffito on the perimeter wall remained long after South Crofty mine closed; its source was the song ‘Cornish Lads’ by Roger Bryant.”