Lache Eyes
I
world no longer turning
like it did when fire
rained down from the sky
and cars stacked up along
dynamic hard shoulders
bound for cities that are
smarter than smart
like everything else
under the spiralling sun
I reach out but you are not there
or here or wherever it is we are
behind doors that remain closed
we breathe the lilac perfume of our thoughts
as if the contagion were only physical
to purge is to be human
is what I tell myself
when the desire to reboot
outpaces the need to remain
in the flesh of your suffering
during snatches of outside
when running the gauntlet of applause
that is not mine
things fall out of range
and are no longer syncing
I tumble like Doug and Tony
the faint line of my ghosting
passes unnoticed through lache eyes
and I slip outside of this time
II
where Boundary Lane curves
into the sandy shallows of a homeland
we've pledged to find
when the water table rises
the border ploughs on
across fields and drains
into a pool of softly spoken rushes
tall tales
smugglers and pilgrims
ferrying night's cargo
between stations of the locked-down day
from isolation to solitude stolen
weighing the murmur of the slumberous dead
the leech coil of spring
pulls limbs from the causeway
we share an embrace that straddles the ages
like groundwater passing through rock
or the alveoli of chanced-upon clearings
where voices come and go in the suspect wind
I can breath
I can breath
expressway traffic has thinned to nothing
birdsong spans the air like a cathedral arch
and prayers take flight in the spaces left empty
all the world is contained herein
we chart a passage through to Balderton
then buffer in the slipstream
of our rebooted lives
August 2020
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LACHE, Sc. Nhb. Dur. Cum. Wm. Yks. Lan. Chs. Der. Also written laych Chs.; leech Lan. Chs. (also latch; lach; lack; laich; leach; leche; letch). 1. A pond; a pool; a muddy hole; a puddle. 2. A swamp, a quagmire; a ‘dub’; a wet mass; a long narrow swamp in which water moves slowly among rushes and grass. 3. An occasional watercourse; a narrow ditch; a deep cart-rut.
LACHE EYES, drained marshland on the Flintshire-Cheshire border, Saltney, Dee Estuary. [see The Sands of Dee]
This poem provided the inspiration for an essay written in response to an invitation to contribute to the book Territories, Environments, Governance: Explorations in Territoriology, edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Karrholm (Routledge, 2022). The title and abstract of my contribution are below:
Territory Glimpsed Through Lache Eyes: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Excursions in Liminal Space
Les Roberts, University of Liverpool
The title of this chapter has been adapted from René Daumal’s unfinished pataphysical novel, published posthumously in 1952, Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures. Conceived in and reflecting on the period of lockdown imposed by the UK Government from March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the chapter is in part an exercise in deep mapping and spatial anthropology (Roberts 2015-16, 2018), but it is also an attempt to both delineate and dissolve the parameters of a hyper-localised and, ultimately, existential space of territory conditioned by an experience of lockdown. In terms of the former, attention is focused on a small patch of land that is located in a patchwork of fields adjacent to the street where the author lives. Going by the name ‘Lache Eyes’, the area is reclaimed marshland located on the English side of the England-Wales border in the town of Saltney in Flintshire, North Wales. The name ‘Lache’ is derived from an Old English word meaning pond, pool, or swamp, and hence alludes to its former topographic status. Restricted to taking outdoor exercise within the immediate environs of the author’s home, during lockdown this liminal territory became an immersive space into which a meshwork of historical, familial, psychogeographical, and critical-creative entanglements have inchoately fed. Where spatial anthropology tips over into more existential ruminations into Ballardian ‘inner space' (and where it dovetails with pataphysics) is in the enforced (legally, morally, experientially) adjustment to the recalibrated nature of ‘home’ under lockdown. In this regard, J.G. Ballard’s short story ‘The Enormous Space’ (adapted for television by the BBC in 2003 and renamed ‘Home’) serves as a catalyst for the re-imaginings of territory, where attention to the liminalities, intimacies and interiority of spatial proximity enables the charting of frontiers that stretch beyond the affective geometries of everyday living.
