Cook stands on the shore at Farm Cove: it is the past.

Sydney surrounds him. Low green apexes of land

slash into the harbour; above blows the open-heavy

of the sky, some equilateral clouds. He is not a simple

man. Banks carefully traces specimens; others

of his crew insert themselves, finding unseen views;

outstare blacks, hook strange fish. Cook does not

have questions. Haberdashery in Staithes is everything,

he sees: he knows that there are no ‘new data’, that all

phenomena are a single kind, a thing of the world

can be neither explanans nor explanandum. Really he

has not left Yorkshire, has not stopped digging in his

garden, is still in church in London, singing. Drink

machines lie buried under the sand. Usually he will

not accept his own simplicities–Where do words

come from? What is the start of action? The harbour

is no place of options: it is like thinking into blotting

paper; in the natives’ language “spider” is the same

as “web”. Products and history start to fill the land.

The royal banners forward go. The music is corrugated,

a twisted metal framework rusting by a desert sun.

Observations are not observations–he skips a stone.

Caged in the captain’s saloon, the bird of Happen

strikes its head against a porthole, forward and back.