Shifting seas; unshifting dunes?
Ten miles from NZ 30151 91845 to NU 27363 04852
a dune-line, rising, falling, drawn and redrawn by wind,
its boundary continually remoulded by wave,
its fabric stitched by marram roots; there are
breaks
where bedrock still extrudes,
where humans have quarried and seawater has encroached,
where hands have made shelter and feet have worn paths,
where water from bog-fields has run to the sea.
The rise has sharp peaks of soft sand which, unsustainable,
cascade
into deep vales.
Face the sea, there is continuous change; face the dunes,
an imagined stasis and slow movement, not by minute but by tide.
But the light has little constancy: it gleams on the sweeps of marram –
styled by the breeze, wind or gale; illuminates fronds
in emerald and lime against the straw of stalks;
sometimes a reflection of cloud as ebb and flow
mirrors the moving force of wave on water.
Shifting sands; shifting light
We learn that a sand-bar is soluble, a mere stacking and layering
of several billion grains of quartz, is ephemeral over days, between
tides; the beach not terra firma, as, beneath the white-noise roar,
the water works invisibly to remould the sandscape,
shovelling troughs, smoothing inclines, dragging in or drawing out
seaweed, seacoal, broken sea life; the remnant of the earlier tide
captured in a stream which fills the trench between
the incline of the high beach and the arching bar;
this stream flows endlessly along a channel formed
to join the retreating tide; and although it should run dry, porous sand
has drunk the waves
and now an under-lake rises to the stream
and keeps it flowing.
We learn that sunlight, depending on its wavelength,
is sometimes up-scattered, sometimes directed earthwards
by the cloud cover; and so, from minute to minute,
shades and even primary yellows, blues,
brightness and reflection, highlighting and blurring,
all transform one into another,
sometimes with the moving cloud, sometimes driftlessly;
on a December day between Stank Letch and Broad Sand Rocks
looking NE and SE simultaneously
low cumulo-nimbus determined a palette;
same continuum of sand, same seawater left in pools,
same small tide-cast rocks and clumps of kelp
but utterly dissimilar hues.
White noise
White noise unwavering white waves fold forwards off Wellhaugh Point
to wash, root and branch, a petrified forest outcrop, in deeper time unseen
beneath strata of sand and boulder; only this beach, stones smoothed by tide
after tide after tide, thrown, beached, perched with feeding birds, presents,
in breaks between the forward surge, the dry rattle in the liquid undertow
a staccato percussive flow of pebble on rock on rocks on pebble;
a few paces on and by Pan Point, hidden in the glistening green of algae coated
mud- and siltstone that sound is gone; now above the white noise
oyster-catchers and curlew compete in complementary displays
kleep-kleep and cour-lee piping;
the dunes are seaspray frosted, the rocks seasplash iced
but this is just rehearsal for the bone and stone sand
of a night seven below zero and the outflow from the ponds held fixed and rinked
from dune to tideline and gleaming under a stream of sun;
and along the shore, on firm sand and saturated, on crusted and dusted sand,
on the sand that swallows each heel-tread the walk changes by the quarter-hour,
the light in the eyes, the colours that still need names, the leg muscles’ reaction
to the ground; and the white noise persists and is the backdrop
winter sound of both incoming and outgoing sea, always in the hinterland of consciousness;
open the door in the dark and it fills ear and mind;
only the canada geese calling as they circle sometimes take its place.
Even in rain; even in mist
Saturated, weighted, aqueous air.
First, insistent drizzle, spattering the windscreen,
slow, then speeded wipe; the drive
past Headagee and Broad Skear chosen purposefully
to flash, between compacted dunes,
a sight of wild sea (silent footage)
thrusting over Snab Point,
white waves bringing mussel foam to shore;
Second, beneath an emptied low-hanging nimbus,
still a high humidity makes tiny spheres
which hang on sharp strawgreen marram blades;
somehow these droplets find some light and glisten;
Third, the bay curtailed in mist shows neither Coquet
nor the Cresswell rocks, no lighthouse lamp,
no slate tiled roofs; only three sanderlings
occupy the smoothened sand wiped clean
by strong retreating sea; the waves still driving,
building, forward-rolling although the tide is ebbing,
the sound still constant; and the sanderling runs are expert;
intuitively they track the probing fingers of wave,
peck peck on sand, nimbly tripping, stepping,
rarely hopping, rarely meeting water
but always parallel to its forward course
and taking tiny food-bites from exactly where
the water-line evaporates,
replenishing the moisture
of saturated, weighted aqueous air.
21.03.18, 12.45-12.55, NZ 278 962
On this section of tectonic plate, late in the Paleozoic
(300 mya) long since unseen, co-existing in a warmer latitude
on the edge of Pangaea:
the shallow sea, its razor-clams and starfish, its ray-finned fish,
the ferns and gymnosperms rooting nearby in future coal-swamps.
On several miles of dust and pebble patterned yellow-ochre sand,
on a day which followed a sunlit equinox high tide –
bay-long lines of forceful waves, silverskyblue in shifting light;
incoming up to the dunes, the shallow endlessly recycled sea
deposited anthropocene descendants: the plant-life
turned to coal from that carboniferous day;
ageless nuggets and dust exposed and broken from
the post-industrial seams, lying lost undersea,
swimming in the mix and abandoned on the sand,
the sand itself the sedimentary remains of sea on rock,
stripping and building;
the deeper broader modern sea deposited, amid, beside the coal:
the kelp torn, ripped from its rooted hold on seabed rocks;
marine life detritus; shells prised empty, clashed;
starfish reduced to decorative mosaic set in black.
And all of these connected
through countless ancestors to a pre-mammalian undated day,
to a location with no grid reference.
Deep time in flux and fluid for all to see;
only a violent churning on seabeds
has blended the living with the dead and the fossilised
and left it all to dry.
In dialogue with sea-listening
(A response 13 July 2021 to a poem by Katy Lewis Hood)
Whether walking on the tide-line, on firm flecked sand (smooth gait)
or quicksand (sucking in heels, then soles, with each stride)
or on glutting, grainy, clasping sand (as from the long-jump pit),
walking, watching, scanning wave motion, scanning seabird
flight motion, matching skylight with wavelight, cloud and swell,
flux and fluidity,
Or crossing the dunes, at first soil and grass and clovers, then
trefoil, restharrow, bloody cranesbill, yellow, pink, magenta,
binding sand with their burrowing, outstretching, rooting,
nutrient-drinking, pollinator-sustaining presence –they pass
the dune over to marram, the straw and the green,
the blade leaves, edged and pointed, and they drop into deep sand,
broad strand, waveline, water edge without being edge,
Whether walking here or here, there or there, always the sea
sounds, each wave-break pitching uniquely on the stave,
not a backcloth, nor a backdrop nor a backbeat,
sounds before the eyes, in tune with breath, planktonic
in the nostrils, salting the air, enveloping white noise,
sounds which foreground a locating identity,
sea-listening not by proxy, but by seeping through pores,
riddling the body, reaching the echo of the last walk,
each wave break uniquely pitching, breaking wave,
pitch, break, unique wave, making familiarity.
Body of Writing 