gulp
By joanne burns
fish and chips on the pier
at watson’s bay, or is it
calamari – something we
never ate in the 50s un-
fortunately; but it’s february
2012 and the daytrippers
walk right off the ferry
for the seafood miracles
in a convenient box, you
nibble at tails of tropes:
‘pilgrimage’ or ‘the biblical’;
you’d probably like the lot –
a fisherman’s basket [make
that fishergirl’s] but you’ll
leave the spicy plum sauce
for the gulls multiplying like
sour dough rolls
from where you sit you
see it again across the
pier’s narrow boardwalk;
a shrouded revenant or
the full tonnage of grey
white flesh: a huge
shape hanging upside down
at the 1950s shark weighing
station, with its giant teeth
in the last snarl of death,
white pointer or grey ‘nurse’
[you were about to have
your tonsils out at the ‘war
memorial’ hos]
you can’t recall how many
years since this station was
moved back towards deeper
water to a less prominent
spot but here it is now – a
visitation – only a couple of
metres away, at 12 o’clock
from your café table, in the
centre of your nostalgia lens:
that fizz of awe relief and
terror that a speedoed
child, towel over a shoulder,
might have felt in her guts
looking up at that jagged
enormity after a lesson
inside the rusty protection
of the swimming baths’ rods
now 60 years later you
munch through your fish
pack and you shut the
lens, almost aware you’re
just another link in the
food chain, barnacled
on; today you won’t trek up
the hill towards the cliffs
where trippers flock to
gape at the site of ‘the
dunbar’ shipwreck [those
gulps of indelible death],or
up the track to suicide’s
crags; behind you piles
of white lunchboxes thud,
anonymous, spent