Emergence by Gary Aro Ruble
MTC Cronin
Currimundi Beach - Eulogy
Back
from the zigzagging edge of the ocean
stands a red gum, alone, like
a young flame.
there had been others...
now the dunes are full of
young girls’ bones
and they are trying to stop them blowing away;
the sea is no longer found
in the sound
of rustling trees, the bush all cleared
fifteen years ago.
the gullies are hot
and full of brick veneer;
young men in yards
beat tied dogs and fix cars –
the place is eighty per cent
fences and the rest
kerbs: “nothin’ to think about”
except chance and ignorance
and social security
I’m back from the city
once every three years or
so
out of compulsion, necessity, Christmas?
and head straight to the beach.
we were the first people to move here;
put our house on a truck
and took it out of town.
set it down at the end of
a sandy road
and walked the dog along the water:
too dangerous to swim, rips
pulling
our suspicions the length of the beach
and back
it really was beautiful...
I grew up here
and I wasn’t raped
(though as my sister says,
“we may
as well have been...
all those bastards”)
and it doesn’t seem
fun when I remember back
just frenzied and lazy and
sad
drinking on the night strand;
boys’ gritty fingers
and on the television’s paranoid screen
a man dangling a noose from
a car window
as his daughter rots in the sand
every day he returns there,
grief stranded
and his tears are mythic
beached shellfish squeezing
out salt water
every few years I return here, my father
picks me up at the airport
but there are no more shells on the sand.
He asks if I’ll move
back
and I say, I’m here for four days
Bio:
MTC Cronin has had six books and two booklets of poetry published, the most recent being My Lover’s Back ~ 79 Love Poems, (University of Queensland Press, 2002). Her next book, beautiful, unfinished ~ PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM, is forthcoming in early 2003 through Salt Publishing (Cambridge, UK). She is currently working on her doctorate, Poetry and Law: Discourses of the Social Heart and lives with her partner, a musician, and their three young daughters.
