The light from the sea

Returning from a place of harsher light,
I wear its fading aura like a caul
here in my grove of trees,
a carapace of brilliance
too soon diffused by foliage,
sloughed off by the river's
leafy sanctuary.

There, ocean gouges and devours
the golden coastal buttresses,
hollows cavities in cliffs
to catch the overflowing sun
in calabash and coolamon
of granular, striated stone,
textures gritty to the hand,
glowing russet, sable, blond.

From a weathered promontory,
the cemetery at Waverley,
a host of marble angels
like blanched figureheads
regard the tombs.

A secret longing for the tide
possesses them, so that by night
they fantasise of riding out Antarctic gales
in dizzy crow's nests rimed in ice,
charmed by nocturnes of the whales.

On the esplanade at Bondi,
running headlong into dawn,
did the people coursing towards daybreak
see the star of love?
Venus, incandescent sign,
quivering in cloud above,
planet the Greeks know as Aphrodite,
goddess from the foam…

Did they observe the girl
shot through with sunrise,
glowing from within,
seated on a rock's rough shoulder,
aureoled in lotus rays?

On the blinding shore of clarity,
my eyes were dazzled by a differential
shift in vision's lens, a refraction angling
perspectives towards other planes,
so that I perceive the once-familiar
differently…