Poem for the Day: Becoming Woman

Becoming woman

i

I write myself on the page

not as the universal I, but 'woman'

padding the tide's morning surf.

a camera lucida of memory catches Broken Bay

in the earnest scurry of soldier crabs, the whoop of rod line

and sinker, rows of paddleboats, dinghies upturned

metres from a young girl/becoming woman.

on the bow of a boat, she ripples film into surface water

tilts the cabin's channel observance

before diving in

ii

she is woman now, remembering the real

that-has-been before the lens, first crack in the sepia edges

of an Ettalong shore, pylon cling of a Wagstaff ferry

its fluxive rub, seagulls shouldering flag-line

their white calligraphy of tarp.

silent beach empty as a lonely dune

waits for the first child out of school

waits for the ringed plunge of blood worms

summer's shifting canoe.

only the bay gives out a different call

when the seaweed's parted and a fisherman casts

an angry fist, buries the globe of his belly in water

 iii

 while ratcheting his dinghy

 there is no need for the ebb and flow of his outrage

 when there are machinations of a better catch, bay offering

 the martini of her sex, olive flesh, oblique lip, the aftermath

 of radio silence, channel marker showing signs

 of deeper water to come, inlet anchoring ideas

 into a dark grid of trees, barnacled shore

 iv

 there on that sea the boat's voice erupts

 churning silt into the engine's memory

 scuttling the gelatin-still surface, silver glide of whitebait.

 on the sandbar's thin back there is no one, no rock.

 only the sound of halyards clinking mainsail and jib, the scum

 of mutineers darkening the page, Phantom busy clapping heads

 off the coast of Martinique.

 she can't wait for the scrub slide, prickly foothills, his breath

 stinging her with last night's rum. she is Daisy lifting feathers

 from a comic book frame, spur-winging waves, the way

 waterfowl do, sending out an adrenalin of colour, though

 her aim is to run

 v

 she has become nineteen

 contemplating the way it was, ghosts under the bed

 voyeurs skirting her legs, flasher at Central. Liverpool beanie

 on a train journey, coercing his fingers under newsprint, 

 thinks he can tunnel the black hole of her knees.

 Phantom's Diana symbolically vanishes from the platform,

 as the day lingers in the hem of torchlight, in the descent of

 theatre stairs. the hushed expectancy: tunic in storms of sweetness,   

 candy pulp in miserable alleys, pace of streets under raucous shoes,

 the Saturday gaze of grimy men. the one from the bay still

 crunching his boots and black singlet into the words of her poem, over

 and over, his loose tongue ripping into the motor of memory

 the lost harbour of her youth

 vi

 a faint scent of the bay returns

 like entrails and fish-heads in the stern of a boat.

 this time, his image is the one the older woman

 releases into water

 catching the sunlight

 before it sinks and drowns.