Blue Hills 25

Cape Woolamai from Kilcunda:
the sky too subtle for a vulgar type
like John Martyn . . . Turner perhaps . . .
Sunlight Through A Bespattered Windscreen;
A Pearliness Below The Cliffs, July 26, 1990.

This last hour
the rocks disclosed by water where a boy cringed,
thirty years back, from the texture of anemones
hurled by an irate uncle

– 106 –

—an image of petty violence
beyond the powers of the nineteenth century?

New grass in the bridge's shadow slants
as it did in photographs; the railway
runs off its trestles deep into sand.