this coast encountered

i

     sea sweep & snook shirk bullseye’s bronzed shoulder

     cut & thrust of long-finned pike & spiky-tempered leatherjackets 

 

     parrot name of bluethroat wrasse 

     sink in dreams of spent salad days with leafy sea dragons 

 

     spiralling nudibranchs that light crevice-dwelling stars 

ii

     shod with semi-circlet of hills, sea reined in – still fighting 

     bit of railway breathed iron & tangled torpor of quayside tramway

 

     locked up & derailed – port fought & shed murray borne cargo to seaweed depth 

     for all their names: swordfish, emu, lapwing & flying fish sank in sun-swamped 

 

     shallows that bristled like paleozoic oceans

iii

     mantling of phenocrysts in updraft of kanmantoo schist

     has interleaved my days with quartz & feldspar 

 

     I’ll walk these clifftops until permian tillite dusts my shoes 

     & ablation till that spilled from ice-sheeted hills frosts 

 

     my heart in purple glow of tourmaline

 

 

 

that chipped against

 

solid light

fragments into birdcall

 

is it rudimentary speech?

 

or is it i with my scrunched A4 of poems

scribbling – not in poetic sense

 

but as in i’d better be careful 

or i won’t be able to read this later

 

leaves sing

reptiles have scuttled down riverbank

 

‘a lizard is a submarine on grass’ 

i quote to all the no-ones around me

 

hear cough and realise 

there’s no such thing as solitude

 

not here wedged in the in-between 

between suburbs

 

light now fled from cliffs

speech behind me american

 

someone else, one-sided 

on phone probably 

 

i repair unreadable words

put line through a ‘the’ or two

 

hear someone say ‘journey’

rest falling indistinct 

 

the birds underlay it all

then rise to crescendo