Watch

My first watch came to me
at twelve. High School now
my father said, you need to know
the time. I wore it proudly
on my new bike, the one I fell off
riding home on my first day.
I’ve had many since. Somehow time
wearies them, or strips away
their fashionable glitter
and I don’t now need a chronograph
to pace me through the last
three volumes of A la recherche.
My current one outpaces me –
it ticks off sixty seconds to the minute
leaving my fifty two slow pulse beats
far behind. Not so my father.
His ticker brought him down
on the footpath on the walk to work
just eighteen years after that gift
that leaves its white encirclement
around my wrist. Each night
I take it off, like putting out the dog
we used to have – and every day
its cheerful face awaits me by the bed
for its morning walk. Don’t be impatient
I tell it, patting it, I’ll get there
in my own good time. Let’s go outside
as my father did, chasing me into the surf
on our summer holidays, forgetting
to take his watch off before he dived.

**

What do they see?

What do they see, these old people
sitting for hours along the esplanade
facing the ocean? The young beside them
stare at their phones, nothing
beyond arms’ length it seems
exists for them here. But the old
stare at the sea. Now and then
a child with its mother might catch their gaze
in a skein of memory, an image
of the past perhaps or a grandchild
distracting like a brushstroke of sunlight
brightening the water. But always
their eyes return to the sea. Is it
distance that captures them, how the ocean
folds round the globe and never ends?
Or is it its nearness, how the waves
are forever approaching, even as the tide
recedes, leaving only a wreath of seaweed
as a dark reminder? Is it how
the sea is an ocean of questions, answers
never revealed, memories
half hinted in its turbulent fret
or placid obscurity? Or are they
searching for their life, maybe, something
familiar, inviting, yet always out of reach
in the sea’s total otherness? Regardless, the sea
reveals nothing but itself, no matter
how long they look, how far they gaze
and is their only dependable companion
on their daily vigil, along the esplanade.

** 

What the wren told me

I used to think a poem was made of words –
you know, the stuff that lies around
in newspapers and books, on doors and walls
what you hear in trams, second hand and soiled
by daily usage over countless years.
I’d hunt them out, I’d put them down
like Lego blocks, and listen to the sound
they made – if they made any – and try
to put some polish on them. Then one day
a wren at Coogee hopping across the grass
its tail vibrating like a tuning fork
its cap and shoulders iridescent blue
like a new way of being awake, silently
told me of other poems waiting to be found.
Put down your pen, shut your computer
just walk along the cliffs, just look around
at what’s about you, watch the sun
write shadows in the trees, as moving and profound
as anything you find in libraries.
The wren hopped off, its message done. I sat
on the grass, at the cliff’s edge, and heard
the long slow breath of the sea, a symphony
older than time, and always true.

 ———————–

Andrew Taylor is the author of nineteen books of poetry, the most recent being Impossible Preludes (Margaret River Press, 2016), the chapbook Coogee Poems Plus with art work by Travis Taylor (Baden Press 2021) and Shore Lines (Pitt Street Poetry 2023). He has published extensively on Australian literature, and translated poetry from German and Italian. He has lived and worked in Adelaide and Perth, and now divides his time between Sydney and Wiesbaden in Germany.