While Camping at Fortescue Bay, Tasmania

Even though I get frustrated by my inability to focus on any one thing, on any particular sport or instrument, for example, even though my relationships always flare up then wither,

so that I’ve tended to drift through life, succeeding at very little, rooted in almost nothing, I’m comforted now by a mango‐orange lichen sprayed over these rocks and left to dry: a huddled collection

of lichen settlements: spotted, stone‐fringed and huddled; and by my girlfriend there, her fiery hair flowing out with the sweeping fan of the Tasman Sea. Despite my lack of success I’ve succeeded,

incrementally, to make a sort of peace with the future – by which I mean I’ve been calmed by poems with freer lines, when Martin’s voice trails off behind me, or Robert’s molten harbour is smeared

with five o’clock sunlight: these are the sweating hearts of places within me. To think I’m on the periphery of such a vortex while the dry, aching space of atmosphere without canyons or signatures, time

flat, withdraws... but wet place sings: to you whose land here we think we have stolen – whose land could never be taken away – I thank you because the silence beyond this poem is yours. Worry, jealousy, spite, these big city numbers; out here, settlements of peace and then of various, unresolved murmurs: collections of mango, molten glass, tragically enormous trees rising up: blue,

wooden, huddled. And the sense that, amongst them all, we are still growing. If some of these things include you, only to then whither before you return – as you probably ought – to thoughts of bills,

conversations, snippets of films, think now of sodden rocks breathing in and out of the bay, gently lapped, submerged, magnified, heaving out – not to say that meaning is this simple

or innate, but to suggest a slow growth, a gentle addition, places and warm sunlight tumbling down quietly over pale, gathered forest.

Stuart Cooke