Well heeled Metung narrows to a spit
between Lake King and Lake's Entrance,
the east side one long regular bristle of jetties
luxury apartments and hotel, though
public toilets lack lighting, soap, driers.*
On the west side venture the foreshore,
sectioned with wide concrete breakwaters
to hold the sand against longshore drift
grass banks clad at their drop-away
in a strewage of quarried boulders
defending the beach road,
sentinelled
by tall weather-board palaces
peering from steep-wooded heights.
The day, one for the tightest baseball cap
which, when loosened -
stooping for a snap,
spectacles thrust up to squint into
dim window of the mobile veiwer -
blows down the shore southeast.
Rising from undifferenced dark,
glaucescent mass of textured swells,
waves break particulate, spitting,
cast and recast their nets of spray,
tirelessly flounce flamenco skirts
or
in undending forays of white-dragon cavalry,
dragooned by land they find themselves,
their violence tamed -
caressing
pebble chunks that cluck and croon together -
then sink on their knees before crusted casualties
of mussel shells and torn seaweeds.
No one there but we two combers.
Seven black swans a swimming bob
in the white ruffles,
one drifts apart:
five pied oyster-catchers, visibility attired
vivid-red legs, lurid-orange beaks
black hoods and gorgets, peck about, peeping
skedaddling for distance from us.
"I would say a lot of riverbed pebbles
were dumped here", Joy surmises,
sorting through the variety.
'So much rose quartz'
the aborigines used it for their tools."
I pick up a little scraper, bearing the
unmistakable zigzag of worked edge.
We comb a few more pebbles,
holey, jaggy driftwood sculptured;
but the prize Joy finds in a crevice,
a dried seahorse, wholly intact
tail curled, Fibonacci perfect,
sea-sanitized,
scentless in preservation.
...............
*Joy tells me that's the norm with beach toilets in Gippsland - but hey! Let's have a few scraps from the table of dosh, what? To sort it out.
