I. Walking

The water in the mudflats
is higher than I remember.
I had a picture of it,
brimming with rain from other springs,
a picture I had carried for
years as one keeps someone’s
younger face.

A black crow descends from trees.
Beyond, Western Port unbuttons light:
a stripe of silt upon the stones,
the season written in its margins.

I came to look again at water.
The flats, it turns out,
came to correct me.

II. Gardening

I plant native shrubs on bare ground
where swirling wind tests the garden fence.

Below, deep in dark I cannot audit,
roots negotiate with clay,
with a buried world, with winter water,
with the slow unseen appetite of worms.

Nothing here believes in me.
Nor will the southerly be persuaded.

Yet spring finds one green argument
climbing and spreading the fence line,
and I am taught by what I tend
that what is true needs no permission.

III. Another’s gaze

In the Sorrento ferry queue,
she looks up from her phone and meets my eyes,
a second, less, and in that second, I am not
the centre of this windy shore.

Her face carries this weather whole,
and I forecast: perhaps it’s
a night shift, a hospital, a child,
a language I do not speak.

She looks away. The ferry sounds.
I carry her across the water,
unfinished, unexplained, a door ajar
I did not know was there.

IV. A remembered voice

I have kept your voice secure for years
the way a Portsea shell keeps the sea,
not the sea exactly,
but its sound, its long restless vowel.

Perhaps I have the words wrong now.
Perhaps you never said
see me now, look again,
by that sunny window facing east.

But the voice is true the way
a song is true,
not because each note has stayed,
but because I still turn towards the tune
as I climb the cliffs of
Cape Schanck with you.

V. Looking again

Not the last word.
The next look.
The flats, the shrubs, the
face, the voice,
the tide across the
breathing sand,
the world beneath our arguments,
older than the names we give it,
unpersuaded by our thin certainty,
asking something more than wonder:
that we look, and listen,
and look again.

 

3/11/2026