Here's where the Nullabor stops.

As if it suddenly forgot itself, the land

falls into the sea and I am groundless.

You are too, but you belong there;

you come out of the blue like a dreamer from sleep,

breaking from its lilt and swing, lift and sink.

Where the elements give way, nebulae of spume

drift off, constellations from the edge of space.

With a headful of echoes and krill

and a crystalline eye angled against refraction

you are making sense of latitude and current,

sizing up the horizon from below. Bejewelled

in barnacles, breaching worlds,

you are all collision, elision,

a balancing act on a fluke, a moment of trance,

an evolutionary quirk. Such a tender joke,

the return of a fossil from this littered plain

to the seething sea, where, re-sheathed in its fin

a hand like mine strokes your lover's side.

Wing-tipped, lick-slippery, slick-smooth

you take each other face to face.

When you dive again, pulse slowing to a long haul,

blood retreating until the brain and heart

are its only reaches, until colour disappears

(first red, then yellow and not long after, blue)

it's as if the earth were too hard,

walking too painful, as if

to open the throat and cry, to draw breath

through the mouth and utter, to close a hand and grasp

were nothing, and I wish

I, like you, were a thing of the past.