I love this place the way a dog loves its human,
wordlessly and to the bone. The shark-spotter
unzips the long, high blue and the sea is so clear
I float in green light over the dark weight of empty.
I walk the blue slate path to Knights Beach,
three feet taller and not needing anyone’s hand,
past the Norfolk pines for the white war dead
and my old new house that I’ll never own.
I’ve known this place since my skin was fresh
as the sand after a wave. Now I’m creased
and coarse as the granites. I feel its moods,
the pilot-light glimmer of hope for dolphins,
how everything tastes better when you’re coated
in its salt. I started this poem with Whizz Fizz
and a Historic Port Elliot pennant. It closes
with chilli squid and a cold glass of white.
I was dumped here, tumbled breathless,
first by waves and later, a man – heart
and faith battered, learning the sea and love
are fickle and the brutal shock of metaphor.
My days here are bright and free as January strains
to turn sand into glass. Sweet shade and granite,
grass and ants, prams and dogs, the sky and sea
so blue from the vast blackness behind them.
Long ago, this bay was forest, these granites spat
from volcanoes. The spirits of so many hover, mine
just one ghost world in the throng. This is how it happens.
Everything will be different, everything will be the same.