So, Yes, she said – because, you see,

I had been walking along Maroubra Beach

with my T-shirt off

in the late morning of a windy day, with flat

lazy surf in dribbles and splashes

and my need to do something with myself

ever since the moment my wife had said, Go to hell,

and life became possible again

with empty spaces in time that I could look forward to,

that excited me

because of what they might have become.

Life was no longer a simple irony of waking up late

with the sun in my eyes, wandering

out to the living room and dropping

onto a bean bag, calling Angela

to find out what time she'd be home, my head

in a hand and the sun burning my legs

while she whined about IT procedures

and I stared at a biography of Rodin on the floor,

thinking of the way she always told me

that I could really write, then going back to my bed

with the exhaustion of it all, thinking of how

I would live the day, as a writer.
Then, a day of me gone with some words on a page

and an ochre sunset on Coogee brick

life was no longer calling her again

to find out why she was late,

and when she finally arrived home with the Pacific stretched

blue-mauve through the room,

life was no longer me on the couch, Angela disaffected,

dropping her handbag in the hall and then

turning up the stereo, complaining

about something or other, then our arguing about it,

then me shouting at her with some Ray

Charles record plodding along in the other room,

the old crooner with his black glasses

and Georgias and pianos and all of this on my mind

on that sunny late morning at Maroubra Beach

as I neared its southern basin.
Down in the shallows I saw a man, flabby around the waist,

who was playing with two children, giggling and

splashing at them over and over

and closer to me, up on the sand, was a woman in a brilliant

white bikini lying on a towel

with a large novel held in both of her hands,

though she wasn't really reading it, I could tell,

by the way her wrists had fallen limp and the nose

of the book had crashed into the sand.

As I neared her she looked up

and I looked away, though

there was still that instant in which she saw me, in

which I caught her pale-pupiled glance.

I walked past

while her deep brown skin shone in the sun

and I thought of her legs as the stained

keys of a piano and the way sex

became anathema to my wife, whose legs

were lumpy, really, and never shown off

under short skirts or in tight jeans, and

how in bed she would lie there, crouched up

like a foetus with her back towards me, so that

the sheets couldn't rest on my chest

and I was left to feel cold on cool nights, and

then on warm nights, rather alone.

But now the sun was burning me black

and I wondered if the brown on my shoulders

wasn't too red, if the time would come, soon,

to put my T-shirt back on.
Dense, green shrubs always bulged

from the sandy topsoil on the headlands of

Southern Maroubra, their colour

fragmented by red thorns and stubborn wildflowers

no matter how vicious the drought, so

it was here as I walked along Australia's cliff

that I thanked the rain for refusing to fall,

that I smiled at the dried up grasses and dead weeds

with their spoilt sensibilities

and inability to handle the times

when they got tough.

A snake stopped me; it lay dozing across the trail.

I smiled at it, then turned to the ocean

to let it have its peace.

The water was calm, though it left

a frilly-white drool around the boulders

clustered at the bottom of the cliff.

Are these the moments, I wondered, when I should be entranced

by the gentle howl of the wind over shrubs,

looking at the piece of moon in the cobalt sky

and in awe of the experience of it all? Like

waking up each morning with my heart full

and dull with my wife

and walking out to the lounge room only

to slump onto the couch and think about

some old piece of music, or some fragment of poetry,

and how it used to move me to tears. Oh, fuck it!

Are you finished? I demanded of the snake.

But its long, shining blackness was like a heavy paste

still drying in the sand, so

I turned back to the ocean

but this time a head was floating over the scrub, a head

and then a chest, bobbing up and down

with the contours of the headland, floating up

from the Pacific and coming towards me. Now her

black sunglasses and thin mouth. Now

her breasts and stomach slick with sweat, her

nipples protruding through white

fabric, veiled

like buds, her hair sifting

the wind to reveal a small, difficult ear, although

I thought it obvious

she would listen and my toes

shifted in the sand and got pricked

by the skeletal remains of fauna. As she approached

she looked down at herself

and I couldn't look away, and she grew bolder,

more colourful, and wasn't it all

so magnificent and unlike anything

Ray Charles had seen – I mean, well,

wasn't it unlike anything he may have imagined

of Georgia, of some wet, flat Atlanta sprawl?
It's a beautiful day, she said to my stomach – a stomach which,

I will add, was quite well toned

and I thought, You too? Are

you also here to admire the things that you believe

you have forgotten about? So

she said, Yes, and, you see,

I know it was only because she had found me

on the edge, between

the heat and sweat of life on one side, and the mindless,

wrinkled heaving of the other,

but I wasn't looking at it that way at the time, as she

approached me with calves a little too thin,

and I noted she had a nose like Angela's

as we made awkward love on the contours

of a sand stone ledge

that imprinted a collage of fossils

on the soft skin around her spine.

So, she said,

tying her bikini back on and me sitting there, wondering

why, after all this time, this had never

happened to me before, So, she said, there's still

something to be said for being a man.

And it's funny, you know, because right at that

moment I wanted to hit her, smack her

with the back of my hand across her face,

but instead I let a snicker slip out,

then a chuckle, a little convulsion from deep

inside my chest, and then another and

another, and soon I was giggling like a child,

laughing, laughing louder, and she had started laughing

too, you know how it goes, the two of us

were lost in laughter and my eyes

were closed, my hands held my hard stomach, I was rocking

backwards and forwards with roars of laughter

so that tears were streaming down my cheeks

and I was mouthing her name, the name of my wife,

Angela, Angela, over and over, her glorious name,

calling for her and crying like a lost little boy, my head shaking

between my legs, my skin on the sandstone

in a crumpled heap of loose flakes

like a faint sketch of myself.
When I looked

up she had gone,

and the wind was whining

through shrubs

like a hollow Ray Charles moan. It was

with his black voice leaping gently

from seed pod

to bottle brush to heavy

succulent leaf that I began to think of music,

and of the way a note

can have two meanings: one

a tiny seed of divisiveness, a separate musicality on its own,

the other an epiphany of the sounds before

and after it,

like the tear and

its place in the soft, wet region

behind the eye, emerging

after only the slightest

tremor in a moment,

trailing down a dry cheek like the scar

left by a snake

as it shifts

through hot, prickly sand.

But by this time I was walking away,

away from the ocean and the things that had grown out of it,

and I had put my T-shirt back on

for the heat of the sun.