Overland literary journal

OVERLAND 198
autumn 2010
ISBN 978-0-9805346-5-8
published March 2010

Your Sea

for Robert Gray

You’d say this grass is a slab of light green sea
and the myriad white flowers scattered through it
the tips of waves whipped up by the wind, or
it might have snowed with these flowers, most
of which have now melted
on a warm, grassy bed.

These are your modes, in which varieties are crystallised
into drops of perception.
My poems
begin as surrealist mess, you say,
which my conscious mind refines into sense.

It’s your world talk. We are specks
of pollen floating;
your poems trace the outline of two at the moment
of their collision (and
their gentle parting
is the closing
of the poem’s mouth).

You weave webs
of wispy glass, thin fingers
of light set against backdrops of heavier
material clusters: what
we all see
but never speak.

This poem, then, is a return
to the sight of the already spoken.

Stuart Cooke was born in 1980 and lives in Sydney.
© Stuart Cooke
Overland 198-autumn 2010, p. 100

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