Stuart Cooke

Extension

after Martin Harrison

no beginning but the channel’s silvery plain shooting into middle distance

to be cut off by the river, its resolute monotony,

lapping and lapping back

domed here by a thin bank of sand,

this wide, friendly channel, glazed with limp shreds of light,

sluiced with dinghies, rimmed by fenced yards,

its clouded-up windiness, the tufts and textures of a low, inner sky,

and (far off) a front’s caught on the hinterland, you feel it bubbling and blustering

(there’ll be rain later, it’ll frizz and spit and pass)

it’s the channel’s glazed, glutinous consistency,

how it’s shorn from the scratched river (passing silently in the distance),

how light can’t grasp it, can’t take hold

spilling from the rims of clouds, how light collides with the weather-beaten river,

scrawls over it wildly, skids towards me,

finds no purchase on the channel’s polished mauve, then sprays out, torn up and scattering

across this glowing, fidgeting grass, this is how you echo inside me

here where I came to search for you (here, as it’s funnelled from out there)

(out there) the sun’s misty rays shot through clouds then disappearing behind the range,

the dark, forested wetness of the distance paired

with the dried-out banksia cones sprinkled around me,

with an earth pocked with ant mounds,

with fragments of bark and twig that press and imprint themselves upon my legs,

and banana palms glistening, and a lonely flag with an absurd, souvenir shop blueness,

a faded redness (now that crescendo, slowly building, the sting

of an ant bite, the swipe)

I stand up and the grass tips into the sand,

the sand bank slides into the water,

then I’m poured over the channel and across the river to the other side, onward,

over the houses (further back),

on towards the hinterland and those smeared, watery blooms of cloud,

the sudden, overwhelming presence of it,

the background transformed completely into rain front, mist scape,

until moments later it clears again, leaving the mountains to re-draw themselves,

to re-contour their sub-tropical darkness with saddles and tree clusters

I’ve used these same words before, and you’ve used these words before,

we’ve used all of these words before,

the channel’s leaden solution flattens the sand into a leathery band, and in the distance,

back beyond the river, a glimpse of road,

a road threaded by an occasional car (the river moves almost as fast):

assemblage of an afternoon storm, its depth, its inevitability,

and this grass scattered with banksia leaves, their rusty commas through greenness,

their flesh-brown curls like some kind of fried street food from far off,

the way these leaves—

the way the sun breaks out now into complete, drumming presence

and burns the channel into invisible, unseeable whiteness,

the invisible, knowing it’s there, a storm’s forehead nudged by a blustering southerly,

it comes anyway, regardless of knowing,

the cool noon sinking into a humid afternoon,

the way it can overwhelm you, the way it overwhelmed you,

how the lines appeared, their smoothness impervious to the wind,

even as the clouds regather, and what they say is lost