Proof that a Woman is a Bird

 

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.