As busy as we've ever seen it, a few straggly dots of humanity trailed across kilometers,
lengthening dune shadows reach their dark amplitudes for the sea, whose shining, ribald fingers settle piously, stretch Sistene, caressing the slope they smooth, sink in to.
All along the foreshore, thousands of cuttlebones - and under the straw of felty seaweed, dried sponges and brush - charcoal and burnt gum-leaves, the odd, toasted Banksia branch, last season's fire debris, drifted up from Wilson's Prom and washed in now with other tragedies.
The fishos (returned to habitat) stand well-spaced, thin and patient, Fauvist studies under the pellucid sky, lines cast further than their stalking shadows into a blue sea, silvering before dusk,
tirelessly lifting amber sand, sluicing with tumbling surfactant* to reaffirm the palimpsest of now.
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Surfactant(s) (yet another word the pisspoor Wattpad spellchecker 'wots not of') the dissolved organic matter which makes the sea-foam in a similar way to the surfactants in detergents.
This (below) was written in the mid-eighties:
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Treasure Trove
In jounced and mantling labial swash, mottled, lisping, creamed to a hiss, and salt-lipped taste of each wave spray licking out to sink in drab sand,
smoothed by these transient, moving mirrors, memoried transparencies, swirl, kiss, jolt-dance and, overlapping, merge to soothe our dogged desert senses.
A rutted, grainy backwash draws us out, seeding recollections dizzyingly slid to white over-lipping of ribbled fringes,
stippling back with regathering waters, rolling through mica moments: shoregifts, these unlocked selves we flood into and are.
