Locked between his headphones
the scraggly haired beachcomber
scours the beach with his detector
its one perfectly round ear
listening to talk-back from the sand
music to his ears :
dollar coins , gold ear rings
or bottle tops , tin cans —
relics of summer’s empire .
On and on he goes
in his hand a miniature red spade
and a blue bucket of hope
This world — we’ll never see the end of it.
So much beauty, above and below.
And just when you thought you’d seen it all,
up pops the Photographic Exhibition on Sea Slugs.
Slugs! The very name invites disdain, derision.
But these are something else: an artificer’s folly,
a frolic of design and colour, of quirky geometries
and improbable beauty — and there are 3000 varieties!
What practical use, what purpose, if not to delight?
Later I trawled through the depths of the web and emerged
staggering, reeling ; & that strange word, ‘nudibranch’
Get your head
out of yr ass,
said my mentor;
all things must pass;
look around;
be here, now;
look at the cows
in the field,
how placid they are
learn what I cannot teach;
imbue the wisdom
of the naked beach
I am all alone
in my shorts and T
on the naked beach.
The sun goes in.
The temperature drops.
A cold breeze picks up.
I head off towards the distant jetty.
Even the gulls have deserted.
No kite boarders. No surfers.
Something is happening to my hands.
I look down
They are changing colour.
Turning purple.
The backs.
The palms.
I am both scared and fascinated.
I can’t take my eyes off them.
I look it up on Google later
when I get home
It has a name.
Peripheral Cyanosis.
His legs, protruding from baggy shorts,
are thick as pylons.
He walks like a jetty would wade
through water.
He works long hours in a candy store
hunched over his tiny laptop.
Not many customers come in.
Is candy on the nose?
*pic courtesy of Pinterest
Now it is spent and lying limp
and placid at my feet —
a contentment of inky blue
but the other day if you
could have seen it bucking
with energy , flailing its
wild hair and arching its back
[ sea mountains surfers abseiled
down ] you would not have been
surprised to see it thrust
its loins again and again against
the soft white dunes nor after
to see the body of the foreshore
bruised and torn nor its rump
so foam wracked .
pic by Lachlan-Ross on Pexels
People walking up and down ,
walking off their sore heads from the night before,
mothers with their daughters, mothers with no one,
people locked on their mobiles,
missing the jaunty waves,
the graffiti of gull talk
and that gorgeous fluffy white spitz from McLaren Vale walking his owner
what’s his name? I ask.
Her, he corrects me. Evie.
Ahh I say after the song.
That’s right, he says. Evie, Parts 1,2 and 3.
And we give each other the thumbs up —
not many people know that —
& could start reminiscing when we saw Little Stevie & the Easybeats
but Evie is keen to get moving
just like Little Stevie who couldn’t keep still;
And above us, because
there’s a strong breeze,
there’s wind surfers flying around
like a dazzle of butterflies,
I liked you had an electric blanket, he said.
I really warmed to that. I liked too
you had a back yard big as a beach
and that waves of love flowed through you.
back then; I liked how we took barefoot walks
along the sand on summer night, the stars
fiery with desire, the hot kisses, but memory
tends to polish things up. to add a gleam
that wasn’t always there;
the cat never took to me and in the end you
didn’t take to me either; our little edifice of love
smashed like a sandcastle by the waves
Look, I’m going to be honest. I made a mess of this.
You shouldn’t try to explain the inexplicable.
I wrote a poem. Big deal.
People write poems all the time. They don’t try to explain them. They just present them. And that’s what I should have done.
But instead I went all mystical: probably the result of my religious upbringing and the time in the Pentecostal Church when I was speaking in tongues. Well, that’s what I thought I did. I probably spoke gibberish. Come to think of it, that’s what others around me sounded like.
The trouble is I don’t stay grounded long enough. I never have. You heard that story about the boy with his head in the clouds, well, that was me.
So I wrote this poem or someone did —- do we still subscribe to ‘the Muse’ theory? It was sort of compelling and confusing at the same time. Are you familiar with that feeling?
And okay, I put down stuff about jabbering seagulls overhead, and the guy with a metal detector who found something and went a bit gaga with it, like I did with the poem I found in my head, the one I carried around like a precious fluid till I got back to the car and wrote it in my notebook, without a drop being spilled.
That’s what I was trying to do all along. Get that last line in. Well, I did it. Sorry I messed up along the way
*pic courtesy of Pinterest by Veronika Gilkova
John Malone 