text || Lawrence Upton

Pin prick stars appear in the overcast

Pin prick stars appear in overcast. Wading across an estuary. Masks cover them. Hair long at the back, neglected, tied up with a bow made of shoe lace.

Something slips into water and swims.

Houses visible, lots of them, and signs too far off to be read, voices on the wrong side of the wind, telecommunications fade and crackle. Other shapes combine from glimpsed elements, cuneiform and Arabic, spars, driftwood, ropes, bits, fractures of industrious memory, turbines, phone lines, edge of a roof against a wave of poplars rooted a little further down the hill. It can't be understood, not that kind of image; circles where the cattle lay, that baby's thought to utter. Curves at the front of a car, complex concaves banged into grace by pressure and recoil, backwash of a boat, a current's cream, deep water lines and shadow of a cloud on streaming rippling surfaces; look into this and you will be changed.

Seaweed splayed on foreshores isolated from brief hinterland by broken engines. Black coils writhe oily through grey surface water, dank gas bubbling out and sharpness of oxygenated air mixing. Stars not visible still shine. Fluorescent moon. A lowercase t glowering between two mauve clouds starting to intermingle.

Chains from stanchions in cracked concrete. Boots on shingle, tyres on shingle, ocean roar that's too far off to be more than sounds of dragging or of snoring.

Brown smears above horizon; all white in the sea from the boisterous noisy moonshine, not only imagined sound, as if recalling films of the blizzardy north and south; this is a white that sings sparkle, the glissen of itself and immensity of brightness, cut through by outboard motor retch.

Today's paint rolls over yesterday's, its wetness shining on the dry matt being obscured, a droning nagging contrast, back of the throat sensation, almost-sneeze of a wet brush slippery held, eyes watery as if from a seep of chlorine, nostrils raised, the front of a head of an office stapler, blocky ovoid shining sphere tipped back, any time now ratchet turns to slam mucous irritates itself out… False alarm, like most alarm. Splashes of silt and diesel on my left sleeve. A stick with green leaves floating, alive still. We drift back towards shore. Ambling almost. A hawk circles overhead.