Elegy on a Beach in Winter

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I found you hanging from the sky, swinging
     like Converse from an electric wire,
     and I tried to pick you from that vine,
     to press you in a bottle of Chardonnay, 
     to drink with a wheel of Brie,
     but you wouldn’t go.
 
I felt you soaking in the gentle rain that sucked
     my shirt around me like a corset,
     in the holy sprinkling of water
     that smelled like perfume in the air.
 
I breathed you in my lungs 
     and coughed you out in smoke
     and cast your ashes off the Westgate,
     watched them sail across Port Phillip 
     in a trance.
 
I heard you in the spray of breakers dying
     on the concrete Hampton foreshore
     last July. You turned to foam,
     and spewed forth from the shallows,
     and I sipped my coffee in the silence,
     broken only by the babble 
     from the beaks of gulls
     encircling, screeching from the air
     and dying on the needling wind. 

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