A promise of colour fades, EOS floats out of focus.
A river of cloud heading in my direction somehow enlarges the sky without me.
What do we see, apart from what we want to?
What we expect to. That is one why of art, sometimes playing attention to emptiness.
Overnight, day has been repaired, a mechanism like dreaming. Or seems to, but day and night factories are extruding more plastics, manufacturing more cars, and petrochemical companies burning the atmosphere. Productivity and efficiency are worshipped, but regulations and polluters paying the price are neither stringent nor effective.
The loosened sea pushes its way towards Woman’s Cave. Waves ride the curved wall, stripping the robust sandstone one grain at a time, giving a polish.
Tiny surfboards are beached along the tideline. With so many cuttlefish shells I decide to count. 35 from Old Man’s Hat to the Cave, around a hundred metres. I rarely count, not the seventh wave, not dollars in my wallet, not the number of poems cranked out last year.
What carnage occurs beneath the waves out of sight, out of knowledge? Perhaps it’s reproduction. After a short life, males and females devote themselves to sex, after which they degrade and die. I thought their winter was mating time.
Their internal shells wash up as memorials along with all our stuff the sea has given up. We easily recognise the manufactured: a severed plastic bottle, a permanent ‘Paint Pen’ (red) made in Korea from oil and used for the alphabet and design.
There a contour for a child’s foot, now worn by tubeworms that tie themselves in knots. Manufactured from materials like Ethylene Vinyl Acetate (EVA) foam, polyurethane, or rubber – all petroleum products.
This beach assembled miniature wreckage, bottle tops, a straw, plastic shards which I collect and bin. Look closely, a small blue plastic piece lies by the jagged plastic bottle. How long would I last watermarked? With my face and fingerprints recognisable?
A solitary gull flings flight out to sea, not another bird or person. I assume you believe in God. I assume you don’t believe in God. I assume you believe in light, and might think that electromagnetic radiation is a happy accident, and not integral to how the universe somehow works quantum mechanics, relativity and thermodynamics, probably.
A ball rolling into the surf is a scrambling ghost crab. A bright sunrise is no longer on the cards. This slow beginning helps me slacken and holster the camera. Everything remains interesting.
Perhaps paradise is not a place, but temporal, found in slivers of time – NOW – listening to the Bar-shouldered Dove calling from the nest below, as I finish this poem back home, two hours later.
