The coming downpour
I learned later, shivering in a December a world away,
that I’d never known the harshness of winter,
only the short, sudden downpours that stunted traffic
and the mist in the park seen through the clouded windscreen
and lifting off the dew in the widening of the morning.
On the road to Manji, the jarrahs hid the wakeful sun,
and the first snatches of light seemed stolen,
pinched from the ageing warm fixtures dotting the highway.
No frost spanned the ground, and there was no rain
but the smell of some imminent condensation
accompanied by a deep fog rolling over the fields,
as if heaven and earth meant to coalesce.
I drove all the way down the Forrest Highway in those small hours,
dead-eyed and silent, imperceptible glances at passing signage,
hand hovering over the stick and waiting for a sharp perforation to this silence,
like the screech of brakes and collisions heard in the night,
imagined outcomes punctuating my slowing thoughts, drifting off,
unknown parties meeting uncertain fates.
Our bodies at dusk
Driving up the highway, knowing the carpark’s full already,
there’s always the murmurings of half-remembered prayers,
artefacts of a religious education,
chapter and verse wasted on the adolescent.
Already too late at that stage, no matter what year you started,
this country doesn’t have the stomach for conversion,
and insists religion is something you’re raised with,
or spared.
The food’s going cold in the passenger seat already,
sun sinking into the ocean
and soft pinks hardening already to a burnt orange,
reminding you enough time has been wasted,
pissed up the wall,
but at least the breeze has dropped.
I never could just run in,
not even when I was a kid,
and I still dip my wrists first to trick the rest of the body,
diving below the waves when the sandbar drops away.
The night’s soft first touches and the port’s distant lights
dull the glow at the horizon, washed-out and worn,
the burnt and browning remains of the day.
This not the kind of tide to dump you on the sand,
frightened and flailing,
but something more fearful, unknowable.
All things lose their shape in failing light,
and all that coalesces is a cool numbness
familiar to the dying and the dead.
I’m quick to return to the shore,
warming again in unsubtle shudders and shivers.
Intractable, inscrutable
It is a collision not unexpected,
the surge of the measured swell
cresting before impact, futile in some quotidian way,
their dying on ancient formations below
throwing up spray that settles in gradations on my face.
The afterlives of violence are felt with the undulating breeze,
gradual in its waning –
stringing along clumps of sand dispersed
and unseen, coarseness grazing figures in vanishing numbers,
and falling lifelessly to the ground moments later.
This anger sets and cools in such ugly shapes
the brittle bastard work that’s misshapen
and swept away by the tide,
abandoned rebel works of reprimanded
spiteful children.
The waves slick it all back in some dull uniformity,
there’s nothing there to interrogate,
no shape to this hot, raging afterglow.
Jack Logan is a writer based in Perth, where he grew up. He has held a variety of jobs, but writing has always been a fixture in his life. When he’s not working, you’ll probably find him at the beach, catching the latest double feature, or out for a run in the local parkland. His work most recently featured in Pulch and No Purchase.
Locative Magazine 