James Orrock: La Perouse to Little Bay after the fire

La Perouse to Little Bay after the fire

Past the small white pill of privileged space
Pinging in flight high above the fairways
Onto the broken stones of the green flower place
We are walking spirit tracks to our histories.

Blackened angophora reach out of blasted sand
To scribble charcoal script on scratched skins
Above pipe-clay pools where scorched banksias stand;
Some show lines of smoke-stilled velocity.

By the light station the piss-soaked bunkers spy forever
Out of concrete sockets lit up in rap hieroglyphics.
Wind is on all sides and the shapes we feared never
Came between the Cape Banks and Solander pincers.

Ships have smashed across Henry Head into howling rust
Minmi’s boiler is a red oxide skull, it groans for release from
Memories of sailors flung from strained cable that burst
Tumbling and heaving them into rabid jaws of surf.

Thousands came to wonder at that monster’s toothless grin—
A whale shark’s spotted tonnage slipped beside Bare Island
Caught by the falling tide, a helpless massif of tail and fin
When gawkers lost their fear and carved in pink flesh.

Koori kids dived for florins flung from soft pale hands
Then surfaced at the mussel pylons holding up the pier
Underwater they ate coins that spun slow in kelp lands
While all around is the commerce in local colour.

Beside the stone watchtower the French priest rests
From the age of reconnaissance without camera;
Père Receveur is now exploring the milky star fields
Navigation is by altar stone, astrolabe and woomera.

At Cruwee Cove aka Pussycat the coast is evanescent as sunlit spray
On the Chapel wall; the God-Man writhes, is split and bleeds
He is the gift wrapped in fabric by Christo and Jeanne-Claude at Little Bay
Stop here, feel the surge, suck, surge of the tide covering the dying day.

James Orrock