Six Coastlines in Blank Verse
I. South Coast
The tide is up. A dark and heavy mass
Of banksia-scrub leans down against the rock,
Where grey slate fractures under winter surge
And mutes the engine’s binary report.
We journeyed downward through the coastal track,
At a slow pace, our sodium and flesh
Bound to the chlorine of the iron wind.
The immeasurable depth of ancient stone,
Decaying under foam, yet never spent;
The stationary blasts of salt-spray caught
Right at the headland’s lip, where winds thwart winds
In ragged, grey, and solitary rents;
The matted logs that muttered to the ear,
Red gum and ash that spake by the wayside
As if a mind were echoing in them—
The giddy prospect of the shifting sand,
The unfettered cloud-drift and the open sky—
Were all like workings of a single loom,
Whose shifting threads are gathered by the wind,
Held as a lens, and without final seal.
II. Flinders Island
The tor stands vast above the broken shore,
A granite bulk that time has neither carved
Nor conquered, only rounded into form
That seems to lean against the southern light.
Below, the orange lichen burns like rust
Upon the smaller stones that strew the ground,
And low green scrub clings stubborn to the slope
Where wind and salt have long since claimed their due.
No voice disturbs the quiet of the place,
Yet something in the massive shoulder’s curve,
The way the light falls slant across its face,
Speaks of a presence older than our names—
Not god, not mind, but simple massive being
That holds the sky and sea in equal poise.
We stand, and in the standing something turns,
A brief alignment where the tor and eye
Meet at the edge of what can be conceived,
And for that instant hold the world in place
Before the wind returns and moves us on.
III. Winter Sky
The cloud has opened over open water—
A column of rain hangs above the chop,
Appearing still while falling, while the sun
Drives through the western break and lights the surf
To something near to turquoise, near to jade.
We stand where boardwalk timber meets the scrub,
The low coast grasses flattening before
Each gust that comes in cold across the bay.
The rain-shaft does not move, or seems not to:
A stationary fall in moving air,
The dark beneath the cloud, the silver field
Of light below it where the swells run in.
Between the storm and clearance, in the space
The two share briefly on the water’s face,
The sea holds both at once and makes no claim.
The waves break on the unmarked sand. The scrub
Bends and recovers. What the sky performs
Above the water needs no name from us
Before the cloud moves on and closes back.
IV. Mogo Hill
The hill is black but not bereft of green.
Along the cambium where flame ran hot,
Pale shoots emerge in clusters from the bark—
Not resurrection, though the word arrives
Unbidden, offering its certificate.
The shoots are shoots. The trunk is charcoal. Both
Are present on the hill at the same time,
Which is the thing itself, and not a sign
Of something else behind or underneath.
The parrot lands upon a shattered limb
And feeds on something in the creviced bark,
Indifferent to the narrative of loss
Or the narrative of restoration. Both
Are ours, not its. It pulls a grub and goes.
The light goes with it. What was orange sky
Above the ridge-line darkens without drama—
No gathering, no moment where the parts
Compose a single face or governing mind.
The hill goes dark the way a hill goes dark:
In stages, as the earth turns from the sun,
And what remains is simply what is there—
The charcoal and the shoot, the bark and grub,
Held in the going-out of western light
Without a seal, without a name to close
V. Auroral Beach
The sea goes dark, then lavender at the lip,
And inland cliffs receive the last blue fire;
A pair of walkers, small upon the sand,
Move under a sky that slowly unseals itself.
The surf arrives not as a claim, but touch,
A bright and foaming sentence at the shore,
Then draws back thinly, leaving wet regard
Upon the strand, as if the world had paused.
Above them, green lights open in the dusk
And gather without sound in folded air;
No throne is here, no final seal of sense,
Only the long attention of the coast.
The eye receives, the body holds its salt,
And something unnamed stands between the waves,
Not heaven, not dream, but the brief interval
Where dusk and water learn each other’s shape.
VI. Wet Headland
The rain has ceased. The rock still holds its dark,
And from each crevice where the water pooled,
A thin mist rises, catching the first light
That breaks the cloud-bank at the eastern edge.
The sea below is slate, then silver, then
A green that opens as the sun climbs through—
Not triumph, though the word arrives and tests
The discipline, offering its easy seal.
The rock is wet. The light is on the rock.
The gannet folds its wings and drops, a blade
That enters water without ceremony,
And rises with a fish that twists and shines
Once in the air before it disappears.
No meaning gathers at the headland’s point.
No voice pronounces from the climbing light.
The mist ascends and thins. The rock dries slowly.
What was concealed is still concealed, though now
The light falls on it differently, and we
Who watch are changed only by having watched—
Not saved, not sealed, not gathered toward a mind,
But present at the edge of what we see,
Which is enough. The gannet climbs again,
Shakes salt from its wings, and heads out to sea.
