Measures

Sarah Jane Barnett

Under water the pockmarked face of a boulder will soften

into international measures. Cobbles the size of a human child

will melt, in time, into pebbles the profile of a sparrow's egg.

We walk the long estuary where the semi-enclosed body of water

mingles in layers of lucid gold and milk. Your face is costal

as your slate eyes map the hills and fallows of the track

before your feet. Our conversation slips like lumbering cattle,

the ground we cover immeasurably diluted by the last

week of storms. You are three hundred days of rain. When we reach

a fairway I tell you, without metaphor, how the saltwater mingles

with the lighter freshwater into a zone where water erodes

water. In the sun the tidal action of swell and deflation unsettles

the bed of the inlet. That is to say, I speak only of the sea.