Amphidrome (Dingle)
Sitting here above the shingle,
The sound of the sea,
Noun churning into noun,
Literally bilingual,
Pebbles clone the shores
As their encryptions race
Around the tidal bore’s
Double-sided face,
Waves repeating on the bawn,
Desperate to cut and paste
The palindromic dawn
Before a syllable’s erased.
February 23rd, 2020
Kailua
Credits
An amphidromic node is the flat point around which tides and seiches swirl, sloshing towards the moon but simultaneously deflected by the rotation of the earth (the Coriolis effect), so that oceans flow in all four directions away from a center (the amphidromic node).
A poem is a flat control point around which language surges. I mention all this because amphidromic and palindromic share a root, and a sense of surging. The word is behind the poem but not in it. The poem swirls around the still, invisible center of its missing word.
The sea is encrypted by gravity into a code where one wave is replaced by another, different wave. English on the Dingle peninsula is replaced by Gaelic. But of course Gaelic was replaced by English. It’s been a linguistic seiche, or swash. After a fight, it was agreed that road signs on the Dingle peninsula would be bilingual.
In the same way, the word “literally” in the poem is an onomatopoetic replacement for “litorally,” so that waves replace waves in a sea-side, or litoral, sense, and in a sonic sense, as of course nouns replace waves in the poem, in order to describe them.
Waves are two-sided, as a palindrome reads the same from either left or right. This dangerous replacing of sides and syllables is like a computer, easily cutting and pasting. Words become frangible, expendable, malleable.
A bawn is a defensive wall or a cattle wall. I was thinking of the Irish song, “The Rocks of Bawn.” Dingle town is a burgage, a collection of narrow plots of land often defined by parallel sheep walls. So Dingle, with all its sheep walls, is a visual palindrome; it repeats itself backwards, as the sea does. It rhymes with shingle, although the word Dingle is only in the title, not the poem. Perhaps I am a tidal boor.
I dreamt this poem, repeating it so I wouldn’t forget it when I woke. Repetition is thus the endangered concept behind it.
All these ideas seesaw and balance within the poem, so that it’s composed equally of all the pressures on it, as an amphidrome is the flat, neutral center or stasis created by enormous cosmic forces.