1
Vivacious blues of the Adriatic bright in morning sun. Sparkle now

like marble, like flecks in limestone buildings curving out to sea.

How they line up like summer revellers before a distant island

imprisoned, from this angle, by the masts of sailing boats. The scene

though, all winter layers. All neat rows outside cafes, where tourists

in puff jackets absorb the blistering glare the water rejects into lips

split by northerly bursts. Into hands that grab for keys, cups, scraps

of sugar sachets. A book cover flapping, imagining itself a bird

ready to take flight into green palms that line the esplanade with

a Roman precision. Their fronds writhing like octopus tentacles caught

in a net, trying to make sense of the world they’ve found themselves in

or how exactly the world makes sense of them. The light blue sky

child-like and free. Stone villas crawl up a hill––jagged cliffs gutted

and filled with beds and sofas and TVs. Small sanctuaries

safe places to dream.




2
                                        A definition of beauty is a simple thing

made difficult in language. When you close your eyes it becomes

more distinct, more articulate. More fleeting, or perhaps more a feeling

of sun warming your aging face still cold from the shade of Split’s

small streets, filtering echoes of Croatian. Harsh and soft consonants.

Cries of gulls. A rattling wine trolley. The Latin and instruments

you imagine would’ve played as Diocletian was ferried across the bay

into his palace. It was the third century then. He had just abdicated.

Had this palace built on his native coast of Dalmatia. You read

that he spent his final days here, tending a vegetable garden, feeling

incessantly dismayed by news of his tetrarchy plunging into chaos.

Your cup slides along the faux-marble table and you catch it, unlike

the blues so perfect, so clear and perfect and materially there. Unlike

the poem that traces. The poem that hears itself a poem and wonders

how long it can sustain itself before collapsing.




3 
                                                                                      So often it continues

like this. Cans of soft drink, bottles of wine, washes of oxidised minerals

in stone. Consciousness blobbing like a jellyfish, like a GoPro strapped

to a stick, recording from above the subtle variations thoughts undergo

after a coffee and cigarette while watching wind off the Adriatic animate

storm clouds the sky shapes from water. Like a sculpture of nothing more

than the sculptor. Sometimes there’s a vibrancy in leaving only a sense.

An outline of what is being said, and by whom and for whom. As if

the blues were a thousand year old stone, older still. Writing between

small waves, the inability to make poetry from anything but the calm

intermittent speech of the shore. The red flanno you bought ten years ago

from an LA op shop warms in the sun, releasing the sickly sweet Jasmine smell

of a hostel laundry. The thought of millions of microplastics navigating

the imagination to here. The bright blue Adriatic. Repeating itself

lapping against the stone.




4
                                               Where everything repeats we find interstices.

Small instances of music. A rhythm that demarcates a distinction between

the person we once were and the person we suppose today we might be.

A bridge of glaring light finds you in sun. Day separates the self.

Into epochs of feeling. Millennia of thought. It’s in what we memorialise

toward that we come to a new understanding of the old. And yet

in one sense, a poet seduces nothing but themselves. Reduces themselves

to nothing but an image emptying itself into the world, and in which

the world finds itself emptied into the cold glaring light of day.