John Bennett #16 Patterns for Kit, first light Sunday 13th

There’s no speech, just noise, a rumble and hiss

from the recursive tide and first batch of cicadas

in the casuarinas clinging to the cliff. The males

are popping their tymbals drumming for a mate

a hoarse monophonic chant exposing patterns,

waves building to crescendos, dying then starting over

or is that imagining? Like when I was young and ill

in bed, hearing all kinds of beats and variations of pitch

from my alarm clock, sickly green with radioactive time.

There’s no speech, but writing in the sky with dark blue ink

looks a little like animated Arabic. Sky writing is as magical

as reading a book, marks telling history, a story or caching

a poet’s voice - send the auguries home. The Etruscans

used the direction of birds calls, the Romans also watched

their flight, but I haven’t seen one bird yet, just heard

a kookaburra in the forest and what I want to know lies

in the past, the one thing we think is expendable, but isn’t.

Another first day of summer, not yet dawn, but the bush flies

have hatched and scribble my moisture, eyes, mouth, nose.

I would catch and train some to shape the alphabet, send

the best to write while hovering in mid-air, and abandon

texting as obsolete. We interpret symbols, that’s the trick,

when something isn’t what it is, like knots on a cord with

Incan quipus or a stencilled hand with sequence of red dots.

As the sea hauls back red water past stones and shells,

evidence from the past leaves a thousand wakes

and tinkles, echoing from last night’s concert, Elena

and Tamara hammering the keyboard with four hands

as beautiful tinnitus - always listening for music.

Rosy fingered dawn, but how many fingers has the ocean?

The beach spreads the light bending at the hinge,

looking that way sounds like silence, eyes closed,

peeping through the fingers back out to sea and infinity,

that incurable curiosity ‘science and explanations’ pursue.

Helios rises and wipes the script. It’s back to paper and screen.