Acrylics on canvas, P van Rijswijk
Evening, my
bedroom a boatshed above the bush;
a wasteland
of wattles and eucalypts, the grey gums
named by
their smells, by their dead-man shreddy skins.
My bedroom,
an aerial hiding-place.
Waves of
belated aloneness drag up onto the sand,
the rotted
footings of my listing room awash
in the
clean green amnion of the waves;
the purple
sands imploded from underneath;
the shore
flushed, oedematous
with the incoming tide.
The wind,
onshore, buffets the silvered planks
of this
solitary shed. Alone, unequivocal, on clean linen,
I discover
the surety, the security, of my boatshed.
What
valkyrie shrieks those wild and wanton cries? In the air!
It’s in
the air! It’s even
in the air- that crystal gleam; the harsh
and unforgiving
light; the green of the horizon cold and sour;
the bitter
tang; a pallid evening star, downcast.
(Today I
passed a woman by the yacht club point
who knelt
before a man; I couldn’t help but stare
as I drew
closer and saw her splaying
and
carefully dismembering a gull. He looked
on,
horrified.
And I drove by.)
In the
rough palings, the timbers of this shed, a curdled stain
with eyes
where once the branches forked.
They,
alone, watch at night- those wooden Rorschach eyes.
And the
slump-backed tides return, and the chundering tides
retreat,
sometimes leaving a stinking flathead flapping drearily.
Other
times, dropping a sandpapered Venus
at spurred
and calloused feet.
