Sport 41: 2013
Adam Stewart — Windows
Adam Stewart
Windows
The beach was a red window
to look out on
or into.
(i)
We didn’t find a pod of orcas, beached
but a clever pile of dead fish, with windows
for eyes
that saw brainless eternity in
their own little
puddles of sunset
everything beneath
the gills torn away, showing red
where the nerves had connected.
(ii)
Under the waves, a silent red
wind
blew, other
and moved the world beneath
the long arms of kelp and seagrass.
We saw windows in
the red rock pools, partly reflecting the sunsets
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partly displaying the fish, dead in
their sunny and
human way.
(iii)
A mist blew in
with filmic certainty, thick
and red.
The meddling sunset
stole the cloud away from the beach
back to the little township, where it sat beneath
the tithe of hills licking the windows
of our little flat above the butcher’s shop, of the empty
schoolyard, and the abandoned church, and the
supermarket and the
bottleshop, and the café, and the
Chinese takeaway.
(iv)
On the rocks we stood and looked through eyes
not our own
connected
by the way
the abandoned
fish-heads gleamed and
washed in
time emptied.