for John Kinsella
Where are they going? Where waterspouts lower their silver
taproots into the vanishing point of a Tasman searoad,
read the ocean's internal workings by what happens
on the surface, in ulcerous light, in the wake of a longliner:
Wandering albatross reeled in like trolled marionettes
with hooks in their beaks; Southern Bluefin tuna,
hauled from a wave to be brain-spiked and opened
by men in yellow raingear, who work like coroners
in the hold of a warship hospital, lowering fleshbarrels
into liquid nitrogen. Walk the aisles of markets,
where swordfish are dumped like deflating, blue rubber
mattresses in a glitter of ice and flies. And when the keel
of an ocean-going racing yacht opens a whale's back
the way some over-ripe fruit will split to the stone
when the tip of a paring knife is drawn over the skin,
the whale rolls, and the crew curse another drifting log
until the boat's wake clouds with blood like a red
spinnaker blooming underwater. They do not say,
with grief like a sea-noise behind their words:
"Charismatic megafauna are great entertainers!"
Where are they going? Into stories and documents
written on coastal parchment and leaked as slime
to currentlines dark with profit; into driftnets
and gillnets; into reef structure levelled by years
of trawling operations. Entering a pulse of light
in the brain-stem of a cadinal marker, a dugong
blows an orange sand trumpet and rolls away, trailing
seagrass like spooled magnetic tape, and further back,
a small white cylinder wired for satellite tracking.
Where are they going? Watch closely. The world's
largest seabird is entering a high pressure system
inside The Roaring Forties. It will glide for days
until booby-trapped squid divide the sea and turn
the glide into a drag. Behind a baitschool
large as an oval, Bluefin tuna are working like surface-
feeding stockdogs as the baitfish change to razor wire
inside their speeding mouths. A dugong tries
to outswim its own shadow, and is overtaken.
They are going beyond the range of echo-sounders
and spotter planes to surface somewhere
inside our heads, vaguely luminous, like memory loss;
like those gold circles that appear for a moment when,
absentmindedly, we press the corners of our eyes
and remember.
