OUR NOTION OF THE SEA

How many times have I told the story
of when we lived at Randwick
in the shadow of an extinct chimney?
How, late one night, we decided to walk to the sea,
though we didn't know the way,
having only an idea of the general direction from which
the seagulls came to rummage our garbage.

So we walked and we walked,
past a haunted house with a scarlet-carpeted staircase
like a bubonic throat;
past intricately scribed and illuminated steps,
and vacuous letterboxes hung with sinister numbers -
satanic tabernacles to the universal god of not being alone;
then around the mediaeval grille of Centennial Park
yoked with purple-flowered vines,
smelling of Saturday-night brawls
in the heat-retching, reeking suburbs.
Orange lamps crouched like small mad women
behind weirdly transparent curtains,
as we trod past, and down toward Coogee;
until we were finally scuffling downhill
as though the balls of our feet had become hot pig-iron.

-This will lead us to the sea, we agreed,
with gravitational relief.

But when we came to the end of that endless road,
to the last bus shelter, like a gaping aperture to
an underground river of time;
to the last house, weirdly backlit and emptied
to the stage of a Punch and Judy show, with Pretty Polly
disembowelled in the wings;
and the last streetlights,
bluing our eyeballs and our teeth to hand-wrung linen,

there was a gaping abyss.

We had expected there would be reflected lights smeared like lard on leather,
or the sound of waves scraping with salt-and-scale scoured tongues,
but there was only this: a matte coal-smuts flattened nothing.

- That must be it, we said,
and we turned around and trudged back to that long empty hallway
full of nightsighted cockroaches and inexplicable aloneness,
finally bereft of our notion of the sea.

© Philomena van Rijswijk