AT WEST HEAD

AT WEST HEAD

AT WEST HEAD

There’s nothing pure.
In this light, everything is polarised.
The sea spills dark letters,
a shifting alphabet.
We stand, half a shadow, on the beach.
Me, knowing that I’m still searching meaning
though I’ve stopped searching love.
Our solitude broken by a kookaburra,
a crow, a boy on the rocks
casting out a fishing line.
The sky is altered with methane
and everywhere signs of industry:
a rusted can of carpet cleaner,
a broken-lipped styrofoam cup,
an oil leak colouring the freshwater stream.
Nature’s choked with similes.
Ant hills like pyramids,
a termite mound, the size of a helmet.
Death too, is artefact, a forgery traced
in this basket weave of leaf litter,
or the flowering banksia, shaved from its root.
Pink clouds meld into the horizon over Pittwater,
blending sky and sea in such seductive
haze, that the headlands seem to be drifting
like all definitions.