I spend a lot of time travelling, sleeping alone.

The temptations would have me slip terrace by terrace,

all the way to the beach, but I don’t listen,

I don’t listen to the narrow-throated blowhole

whooping it up out of limestone, the sea a refuge

of brutality and waste: where we escape

they alter the coastline: shipping sand dunes

’cross town, widening profile. Where we walk,

where waves cosine and hemisphere the beach,

wet and dry coexist – we’re not between a rock

and a hard place, and wherever I slip, you follow

or I follow you. Fishes flip at the river mouth,

which rarely breaks through, though when it did last year

indigenous people came from a long way to witness

the flow. The sea rose like a bubble then spread.

At night, here by the mountain, the sea is residuum.

It brings the violent and the calm out of people.

The clash is the tossing and turning we wake from.