ANOTHER KIND OF DEATH
Early on a morning premonitory and grave,
leaving the flysheet to bead and drip
where he¹d touched it in a physical dream,
he tapped the barrel of a wittering flashlight
and entered mangroves anchored in woodsmoke:
a maze of aerial roots and air-drinking tapers
like slime-nourished, black asparagus.
In the open, he heard the whistling kites begin
their highland clearances; he watched the blown
ember of a star die out on the side of a dune.
On the beach, casting slivers of metal
to an archive of seamless water, the head-
shaking tailor came in through a gutter
lit with phosphorescence. He fished until first light
shoaled over the bay; until he could see
great snags of tidewood, and he went out to find
a pilot whale calf going to leather on a sand bar
after a stranding, like the unclaimed body
of the poet Delmore Schwartz, who understood
that to be alone for too long is another kind of death.
He counted and touched the backs
of fifteen whales: most were dead, with sea-lice
blistering their eyes, with small crabs
snipping ineffectively at their undersides.
One blew a plume of rank air
and settled into a declivity panic had carved.
Another tail-whacked the sand, and made a sound
he¹d heard in the palliative care ward
on the night his father died.
A day¹s walk from the car, there was nothing
he could do but move among them, saying things,
in water pouring through the channels
their connected bodies made, his hands on their flanks
numbed by tiny detonations of despair.
A kite whistled from the headland
like an offduty engineer, as syllables
of animal longing were shared
by the last two whales, like an oxygen line
containing waves of appropriate music
until the air was gone.
......................................................
Anthony Lawrence
PO Box 75
Sandy Bay
Tasmania 7006
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|