The Waterwheel Once Again: Mrs Rochester’s Story
Drawn as I am to it
I fear it too
Its dark beauty and power
Black with age and use
Cups again and again the soft water.
Made mild by dale and stone
The drip, drip, drip of
Mother Shipton’s cave
Petrifying a hat, a ballet shoe
An umbrella
Hanging like excavated Pompeian
Artefacts.
There is no wheel there in the
Garlic forest
up in the hills
A damp cave for a home.
Driven from town as a witch
she was feared and saught.
This wheel is an attraction so great
I abhor it.
It has a pull on me.
The rhythm of its rhyme, the rhythm of its rhyme, the rhyme
of its rhythm
A repeated phrase
In mechanical shouts
And watery gutturals
The crank and grind of it
The burden of industrial weight
The insolent preponderance of it pulls my eyes unwillingly
to its black presence
Its perpetual motion
Hypnotic
Wavering on a precipice
How easy, how freeing just to let go
The edge of reason
I look down into the foam
Everything is lost – all is nonsense.
Nothing matters but the up, up, up
Of the paddles
The motion
as it lifts and sluices the water
Again, again, again
Each container hits the light for a moment on its journey up
It is shadowy in here and the wheel itself
Is pitchy
But a spot of sunlight from the
Chalk fogged window hits
With mid-day clarity
The same point.
And as each one reaches its zenith at the roof top
That site of burning light
It is illuminated for a second.
It rises
Cupping water
Drenched
Dripping with black pond slime
Spattered off by gravity and speed.
Motion and the parting of the water
Until it arrives at the
The point of examination
The instant of reflection
The moment of clarity
When it is splintered.
The dirt saturated,
sodden wood and age blackened iron
Is revealed in pure blazing light.
For this moment it is transcendent
Truly authentically itself.
As it rises it
Disappears, fades back to black
Into the omniscience of shadow
Incognito
With the cogs and the water
Its brother paddles
Its sister spokes
Its cousin cogs
Slips back into obscurity.
As the crankshaft, axles and flywheel move
In unison
singing its own unique song
Harmonising in a symphony of
Unity.
Its singularity becomes
Part of the accord.
The forces that ground it to a halt
In the past
The great flood of 1975.
when the silt of the river rose and advanced
until the whole wheel system was petrified
submerged, stilled.
The weir itself
lost its footing and went under
she that had stood for 350 years.
And so it remained
Immersed
no longer controlling the water
but controlled by the weight of the water.
Immobilized, held hostage, helpless,
a prisoner of the two great green bodies of Aire and Aire
and Calder Navigation.
The island of Thwaite Mills caught between the two torrents.
Imagine the surprise of pike and stickleback
in the new country of wheels and cogs
and the inside of cottages and houses.
Gradually the water subsided
Not the same with the weir in ruins.
Generations of silt, chalk and china clay clogged the works.
The wheel remained static, stuck
Mid motion
Congested and laid low.
Impermanence of structures and schedules
Laughable in the face of a wall of water
Wreaking devastation and destruction.
Putting a full stop to the motion
Of the wheel
Creating of the wheel its own full stop.
Hard to imagine now.
In full force and vigour
Each paddle holds
in its repairs and
Remade functionality.
Memory of what it was to be halted
What it is now to have renewed agency
In the water
Is held in its genetic make-up.
The Aire and Calder Navigation and the Aire, dark green
blackness
Conspirators, accusers, cause of downfall and ruination.
Partners.
The very element that makes the wheel function or fail.
A marriage of convenience and arrangement.
Ruin and redemption
Not Jane Eyre this time but Mrs Rochester.
Armley Mills is Jane Eyre.
Thwaite Mills is Antoinetta Rochester.
Consumed by fire and water.
Comments
Post a Comment