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

Popular posts from this blog

Collect Art Publication July 2023

Image
 First published in Collect Arts Summer 2023 edition Stone all the flowers   The year of the art school tutorials. The difficult woman you are to me, and the difficulty I present to you. The year of my recovery and your husband’s death.   Your husband fails and worsens through the days of our trimesters together. As he weakens and declines, I grow incrementally stronger. As if terrible fatalistic scales of balance, set and reset.   Do not cheat her. Give her a full measure of time and experiences with him. Pressed down, shaken together and overflowing. She, in the face of all this decay   Chooses to destroy flowers with stones. Until their purple hearts stained the cartridge with their elemental pigments.   She cuts the flowers only to waste them in the parching sun. It is the cycle of being and unbeing, the grass withers and the flower fades (Isiah 40:8). She decides to press her flowers till their lungs burst on fine co...
Read more
Image
Blackbird Egg Time slows down in the Victorian mirror. She is haunted by every face that checked themselves in the glass. She is on the cusp. A life about to begin in earnest, on the tipping point of adulthood. On the apex of future relationships, sexuality and desire. “Yes” she says, “that’s me in the mirror”, long brown hair, grey-blue eyes. She is just an ordinary brown bird. But common or garden blackbirds create sky eggs, objects of beauty and desire. Each one speckled slightly differently in the genus. If only she can create of herself such an object of yearning, her small brownness will be worth the transformation. On the Hall-stand crafted in a grand antique style, are a collection of blackbird’s eggs. Saved in small glass containers with their lids tight shut. Through the glass she sees pale blue specked eggs, broken with raggedy edges. The armoire ominously overshadows her slight fourteen year old self. Whom she sees reflected back in multiple mirrors, framed in the warm glea...
Read more

Chap Book #3 Gone With The Wind

Image
  Delighted to be published in:-  https://www.cistaarts.com/product-page/chapbook-series-3-gone-with-the-wind Learning craft from the wind   There was once a woman. Who learned craft from wind, art from the sea and design from the earth. She sewed intricate organic patterns in labyrinthine repeats. Her creativity was celebrated through the land. She was known as La Corachine, beautiful shell of the sea. Her daughter Powys was as natural as the elements, precious as comfort and radiant with gold-nature. One day an old woman coloured like an autumn day came to their door. “I want what is yours.” She said, and stuck a pin into the girl, who transformed into a brown-bird and flew off. “Old woman”, cried the mother, please cook a meat and potato pie for us. “Of course”, she sang, catching the brown-bird-daughter. And made her into a pie with potato skins. The leftover bones she threw into a corner of the garden. In three days, a beautiful tree g...
Read more