Estuary

To Rex Hobcroft Wind crosshatches shallow water. Paddocks rest in the sea's arm. Swamphens race through spiky grass. A wire fence leans, a crazy stave with sticks for barlines, wind for song. Over use, interweaving light with air and substance, ride the gulls. Words in our undemanding speech hover and blend with things observed. Syllables flow in the tide's pulse. My earliest memory turns in air: Eclipse. Cocks crow, as if at sunset; Grandmother, holding a smoked glass, says to me, 'Look. Remember this.' Over the goldbrown sand my children run in the wind. The sky's immense with spring's new radiance. Far from here, lying close to the final darkness, a great-grandmother lives and suffers, still praising life: another morning on earth, cockcrow and changing light. Over the skeleton of thought mind builds a skin of human texture. The eye's [art of another eye that guides it through the maze of light. A line becomes a firm horizon. All's as it was in the beginning.