CORAL BAY
Paradise Beach: Venus Approaches The Water
salt air and yellow-blue light and sounds
of sea:
is it possible to resist? so, to play, shout:
for a time, for a time, but the frisbee falls
as it must and the game stops and
talking stops and we turn away to
our own devices:
Theresa on her back, reddening, listening
to Elton John: Don’t Let The Sun
Go Down On Me:
Vanessa with Woman’s Day: You Too Can
Attract The Man Of Your Dreams:
Tim who traces designs in the sand with a
slow deliberate finger as he pages
through The Coral Bay Holiday
Planner: tours, treks and cruises,
charters, adventures, flights and
explorations and attractions:
I open a second-hand 1960 edition of The
Lost World Of The Kalahari and
turn to chapter four and read of a
desert which, when the rains have
come, grows sweet- tasting grasses
and hangs its bushes with amber
berries and glowing raisins and
sugared plums …
Tim turns: ‘what’s that shit yer readin’,
mate?’
‘well, there’s this bloke, see, who goes on
a journey in search of the First
People of Southern Africa who
live in harmony with …’
‘yer wastin’ yer time, mate’, he snorts,
and he tosses aside the holiday
brochure and scans the beach
and sea and sky for whatever:
I shove my feet into the dry warm endless
always sand washed from the blue,
blown into the low dunes of land
gripped by saltbush, and spinifex,
by sandbinders, and read on as I
lie beside other sweating lives,
hungry-eyed lives, travelling lives
here for a time, for a time, beside
this curve of the breast of the bay
on this Tuesday morning in early
April, the salt air fretting at the
pages, the sound of sea sure, and
clear, as the light it meets, blue
fastened to blue, unquestionable
blue, and the water flooding warm
that washes slowly, rinsing sand,
weed, the coral, and cleaning as it
carries in oxygen and nutrients,
feeding the wanting, hungering:
and pretty soon, the women tire of printed
words and images, they stand, they
flick back their hair:
Theresa lets slip her Kuta Bay wrap: ‘Venus
approaches the water!’ she cries:
the women splash in the blue, shriek, they
come forth taut and bright, shaking
buds of water from their pink-white
breasts, proud-nippled:
‘bloody hell,’ Tim growls, ‘they’re gaggin’
for it, mate: I reckon they want it
as much as we do, mate: what do
you say?’