pale season

Sea, horizon, sky.
Pale. All grey.
A smoothness for the eye.
Seven people sit in trucks
pulled by another truck and called
a train. Along the waterfront.
Two ice-cream vans. Children,
soon to have runny noses
are being fed weighty cones
by selfish grandparents.

In the café this morning, a father.
He was an innocent, tanned-faced man:
wide teeth, small blue eyes with his
bright, white, Mickey-Mouse child.
I said, ‘Look at that man. He is
a beautiful man, square-smiled,
but he is not good-looking.’
We waited for drinks. Coffee. Chai.
You ate an immediately-delivered biscuit.

But everything here now
is as quiet as the colours are pale.
Silence washed out to a blue-grey,
except for the black dot of helicopter
mosquito-ing the sky and the
see-saw hawing of gulls
marking territory – chips, lawn and the
cool blade-edge of bay.

White dog. Girl with headphones.
Chubby son with mum, walking on
the outside edges of feet.
Someone runs.
Runs and it is quiet, pale and grey
except for a family further up the beach
blighting the contrastlessness
with colour. Red polar-fleece.
Blue child and something yellow.
My eyes look away and out to the distance
Where the quiet – I imagine – is not interrupted
By anything primary.

There are mountains somewhere out there.
Leaden mounds atop the sausage line of sea.
The city too with its smog all
mercifully grey.
‘One day when I was sad’, I explained,
‘I painted a black line under my eyes.’
We were in your bathroom, squashed into
the mirror and you brushed my cheeks
with a fat brush that had been
rubbed across bronze, make-up beads.

When we were finished
you told me I looked well.
I ate rice cooked up with currants.
You ate cornflakes with raw sugar and
low-fat milk. Afterwards at the café
they forgot our drinks.

I want to be an artist, I thought,
because when you make art you fall
outside of class and therefore
above it.

I walked up concrete steps towards
a pond filled with four fake storks
riding atop dragon-mouthed
green-painted tortoises.
Steel. In chlorine water.
The steps made me pant. ‘If you
keep moving, Antonia’, I said so no one could hear,
‘surely everything will be okay.’

The jetty has a line of red - two lines -
painted all the way around it.
It is a round jetty, encircling the sea pool.
I missed a sea-summer this year, eating idli
and drinking over-boiled tea - dark and sweet
to rot the mouth off you.

I need to buy sheepskin boots before winter.
It is my refusal to be cold. To totter cold-soled,
cold-ankled about my house
For a whole season.
‘I am at least worth boots.’

And there are people wading in the sea pool;
girls acting out history in bloomers and
shower-caps for a camera on the sugary sand.

Apparently my priorities are in the wrong places.
The judgment has slapped against me like
a steel fly-screen door all week. All week
an image of summer bleakness hitting me on skin
already fearing winter.

If I write and write and write -
ten poems a minute, a thousand an hour -
every year to drown beneath walls
thick with paper, I believe life
would be bearable. I believe I could
agree to die, without having worked
anything else out.
At all.

I will drive home soon.
All sixty-seven-odd kilometres
of the Princess Highway.
And none of that grey will turn to rain.
No joyous splattering, just silence
moving faster.