Finding beauty

The highway springs the riddle of stars,
a minor odyssey, a slight tension.

I drop Wyn, kiss her beautiful
smile beneath LED cool

then pull over in darkness,
No Stopping, sunrise is flooding

the runway’s fringe tamped
with mist – a beautiful violence.

Catch dawn filling the marina
glowing with irrelevant beauty.

Glossy Black Cockatoos gargle by,
a good omen on fresh Autumn day.

Sooty Oystercatchers are pipers
cutting through the forest of masts.

Below an Eagle Ray circles slowly
what does ‘all the time in the world’ mean?

Motion alone carves beauty, along with
the spread of constellations, the tail stretching,

stretching . . . the camera tearing off
reflections, resuscitating cerulean.
Mullet packs roam off Stripeys, Reef Lizardfish,
Barred Soapfish, Pipefish and unknowns exciting colour.

I have an hour to kill before I pick up some photographs,
I kill it on a walk, beauty scattered everywhere.

Sight rules from stiff pebbles to the blur of sea,
the flow of the surfer before capsizing.

The beauty of ruins and accidents,
the ocean breath, fluttering wildly.

What you have to understand is that
what’s missing is the song of the sea

resisting gravity, patrolling the beach,
followed by a Willy Wagtail.

Sculptures buried upside down
are statements the camera works with.I should be barefoot, I should be naked
among so much natural beauty,

sumptuous and strapped
but still incomplete – missing her.

I believe the world will be saved by beauty. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Prince Myshkin, The Idiot (1868–69).

Only in the contemplation of beauty is human life worth living. Plato, Symposium, 211d (c375 BCE).
Beauty as a Platonist force is a glow or trace that enriches form in the idealised world of utter order and discipline in the Forms. Life’s not like that, beauty is never flawless.