Flugelhorn on a Pembrokeshire Beach

A sea horn, a silvery
beach horn cast ashore
on the grey shale, its silvery glint in the sun
against shingle that looks like another weather,
always a later time of day, sadder month of the year.
A horn washed up:
now, that I could credit,
a horn like a conch or a cowrie, picked up
from some layby back along the Gulf Stream. Horn
like a nautilus that’s been sailing since…prehistory.
But this was horn
erect, horn upright,
just above the tideline, and preening its glitter,
its visible flash of surprise: what land is this? Ear
to the ground now, wondering: Could I take root?
Horn, drawn back
to the waves’ edge
now the tide’s retreating, as the border collie
with us has to dance and dart back from its herding
of those never quite compliant flocks of foam.
What horn
says there, at the tide-lip
where the long grey backwash makes a wind-chime
tinkle out of flipped stones, well…though it’s just
in earshot, it’s not for our ears, not for us to say.
By evening, horn
had found the cliff path.
Sunset was rigorous and minimal, a single
calibrated line of pink. Horn waited,
I think, and then measured his first note by it.
When horn
escaped from his own dimensions
he went running out along the steep slabs of the cove
like a race-track’s camber, right to the point, the last rock,
flushing the seabirds off their roosts on the way.
Those dark heads
surfacing, a hundred feet down,
they were only the rocks the waves heaved back
and over. Not seals hauled in to listen, or to sing.
For rocks to rise and listen, though, that’s stranger still.
When I was young
there were fog horns
I remember, all down the coast – a lost herd of them
out in the sea-fret. Their call, one to the other (I believe
they are nearly extinct now) was Come home, come home.
In horn’s morning
he’s back on the beach,
another, trimmer horn beside, a different glint
of their silvery chrome, their tubes and valves in parallel.
Walk on by. There will be music. Maybe, harmony.