Low Tide

Australian Autumn Ocean.

If I seem obsessed with the sea it is only because I live close to the ocean and have always loved it from my first memories as a small child.

I am also obsessed with deserts and rivers and mountains and trees.

As for love….

Well.

As a Poet I disclose my heart. Think of it as what happens at low tide when the sea goes out and you find what was there all along - now exposed.

This is something poetry does - it pares away the inessential; it parts the emotional sea; it uncovers the lost and the left behind and sometimes even the buried treasures of desire.

So it is natural to me and a magnet for me to visit the ocean at low tide, as I did on Friday, and this is what I found….

Low Tide

Under the sea there is more sea and then there is this -

the obvious - as the outgoing tide shows us.

This is rock but not land. This is water,

yet not ocean. This is the time between times.

All alone and looking I find only myself, walking.

This place offers me everything - owes me nothing.


The stones are scattered the way words are scattered - a complex

lexicon to be learned. I am lip reading landscape.

I am finding the the punctuation of geology, coral clumps and coves,

I am learning the unwritten grammar of seaweed, of shells and of sand.

Here, even a dead dragonfly, motionless, can decorate a beach,

attaining through death a certain, indefinable significance.

Each shape asserts itself in my sight confidently, as if it can never be other than it is, even though it was once otherwise, and will one day be gone.

The beach - each grain of sand once stone - knows this. The shore exists only because of the waves which, individually instant, are collectively endless - incessant.

Seeing a pool lying languid, liquid, separated from sea, stilled as a mind meditating, each stone a thought - as if by being a Poet, coming here, I have willed it into being.

And then just this, the tide turning, ocean returning, footprints in sand swirling away, memories like fish, caught, and the leaving, relinquishing, the end of this day.

After note:

The dragonfly was as I found it, lying still on the beach above. I lowered myself to the wet sand for the close up view and today decided it belonged in this poem.

Then when I downloaded this final photograph of the beach - thinking it was the right image to conclude with - I noticed a dark spot in the sky, almost exactly in the centre of the photo, just near the top. (You can see it yourself, if you look).

I thought it must have been dust on the screen, or on my lens. But then I looked more closely - magnified it - and this is what it is:

A dragonfly :)