(for Pete Hay)
I know seashells, you say,
as you walk Nebraska Beach
head down
hands behind back
The vernacular names, anyway
painted ladies, flower cones, doughboys
cart-ruts, hairy arks
It was simple, you say,
I’d pick up something beautiful
and want to know what it was
A man who knows his place
on an island off an island
at the edge of the end of the world
Where the sea writes its story
on dolerite and mudstone
revealing the lines and the distances
between blood and carbon, breathing and not
Where the absences make you ache
and you’re forever reminded of them
as you walk the bush or shore
Where the tragedy, you say,
is not that our young people leave,
but that they don’t come back
Just up ahead you catch movement on the cliff
a blackfella? a chinaman?
a thylacine? a child?
But it was only the lights
a reminder of what’s missing
and
what’s here
Back from the beach
you add a chinaman’s fingernail to your shelf
brush off the grit of a thousand years of waves
on rock and bone and glass and shell
Out the corner of your eye
the glimpse you carry
like sand trapped
in the seams of your pockets