52. Virginia Shepherd's 'Small paintings with words' - inviting Sarah St Vincent Welch into the garden

 

Small paintings with words

 

boat cuts a crab’s claw slash

pale sea, scumbled on the horizon

land, a taloned finger pointing into

white blur

 

the sea’s lips open, close

 

smooth patch on the swell

schooling fish!

fins serrate the foaming crests

boiling, leaping

a shark’s below

 

wind—

macroscopic force, molecular motion

billions of molecules flowing in concert

waves on great atmospheric rivers

relentless north-westerly

begins at dawn with the eye of the sun

keening, a wire, shrieking

 

clouds—

gale snaps at their tails 

cumulus growing horns

a dark contemplative face

my face perhaps, peering through a microscope

skeleton of fish, a humpback whale

shark’s notched maw, moon sized eye

 

a querulous lapwing calls her mate

devoted to a crazily situated nest

all life, driven to send itself forward

outrace entropy

sitting on, despite the gale

trees lashing, thrashing,

the bird’s black cap is resolute

 

the sea at night

my father

grey flannel trousers, soft shirt

scent of tobacco, seaweed, petrol

out in the fishing boat, Prussian blue waters

drowned, lost at sea? yet

 

wooden boxes, silver pike

under a bare yellow bulb

a flounder in the water, a lighted spear

green with a sodium glow

kelp like wetsuits discarded by divers

bearing tridents, foam on their beards

 

my mother departs, outgoing tide

see her black hair from behind

I’m waiting for a different current

in the doldrums, becalmed, around and around

 

the channel

jagged, blasted, rough

pushy demonstrative wind

plasters its fingers, combs back the waves

a clawing flourish

yacht at the wharf, mast snapped

carbon fibre, what wind

can do such a thing

 

rain—

glass beads, sharp edged

hammer the sea grey green

the gull’s breast, white as foam

 battling waves

someone in grief

 pounds a table, over and over

 

the jetty at night, lamp-black water

waves lick pylons

proton pump, luciferin, flash!

dinoflagellates, ostracods

diatoms sliding in glass canoes

noctilucent, luminescent

pinpricks in a sea-sky

 

cold stars blinking

a fish, uranium green

flicks past, meteor trail, shooting star

flash, flash, a starfish is a disembodied head

walking the sea floor on its lips

science says

 

orange harvest moon

gilding the waves, scraping fish-scales

golden disc pressed transiently on sand

bluebottle’s sail inflated, twisting

sailors run aground, Velella velella

mercurial liquid, lick in, lick out

glissando

 

clatter of trailers, bearing big boats

sharp white prows, snouts of sharks

remember the quietude

when all was vast

so many boats shrink the lake,

sliced into slabs

only the wetland is dreaming

 

dark shape, swiftly shooting

snips the water’s silver skin

kelp coloured, peering through seaweed

intelligent, scheming, brains in its arms

octopus

shhhhh, be quiet

pink shell wavers in the mirror

stars in the background, planets and dust

where’s the horizon? how far, how long?

cyborgs thinking

ten thousand times faster than we

who are as plants, but lesser—

these days, everything’s a portent

 

deep time

sculpted boulders

holes, rills, keyholes

once a riverbed, Devonian,

crinoids cased in lava on that one Permian day

how did we get here?

wet kelp, rattles of stones and shells

 

the sea’s lips open, close

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Virginia Shepherd is a beachcombing biologist who writes science fiction. Over many years she has researched cell communication, bioelectricity and plant intelligence. She lives between the mountains (Darug country) and the sea (Yuin country) where she continues to explore the world inside this one.