Mostly when I arrive at places
it is winter. Here it isn't.
The sea pants, the islands smoulder,
the sun is an egg-yolk frying in the sky.
I have come here not to slake the senses
but to assuage an old thirst for the sea.
And so to this anointed strip of coast, v dark with shrub,
the beach white with fish-scales,
gridled by islands that seem to float
like pieces of a broken carafe.

Slack surf, the tides
withdrawn into their private limbos.
Hotter than the sun
is its reflection in the sea.
Obsessive whiteness:
lime-washed shacks gleam in the afternoon.
The wavebands of the sea shimmer as we swim,
our landmark on the beach a rusted anchor-
the spiked mace of a drowned sea god.
Neither to the shore
nor to the deep sea drag me.
Leave me here among the shoals,
anchored.

At night the harbour lights
outflicker the stars.
The wind wheezes in through shuttered slats
as if a lung of the night were pierced by a glass sliver.

The night passes in baby-whale talk,
a baby whale which came in
with the foam and outstank the city,
till the fire-brigade cut it up
and threw it back into the ocean.
When you come to the sea
your nightmares have to adjust.
Don't look out for the flying fox,
nor wolf nor hyena;
but piranhas, bluebottles, sharks
and the bleeding blubber of dismembered whales.

Rearrange your private hells,
switch your sandstorms off
as you lock up your deserts
and bolt the skyline hard.
Clothe yourself in the limp sail
of a boat stranded in mid sea with no fresh water.

At night 1 dream of an engine groaning
as it comes heavily to life:
the whisper of a force six
gusting to seven as it bellows into power.
A fistful of wind smacks the sail;
the mast cants
water churns and gurgles along the hull;
the helmsman on the wheel;
the salt, the spray, the braced legs
and the blood coursing
to a true thresh to windward.

Morning: islands, like somnambulists
which had walked out on the mainland
and awoke to find themselves waist-deep in the seas.
The wind
sings at
high
tide,
the palm-fronds reverberate.

Bombay is black yeast
from here, and black salt,
a wall of rotting muscle.
Across the harbour the vertical
city of the rich keeps rising-
grotesque heads on unsteady shoulders.
The slum-city of asbestos
squats at its ankles,
huddled behind a smokestack.

Horse-shaped clouds are sniffing at the sky
and whinnying, as the wind
gathers her skirts and takes off.
The jetty cannot tame the sea:
a ten-foot wall of water
with a three-foot ridge of foam
heaves against the dyke.

At night the cyclone
is many-throated, many-lunged.
Gulls dash against the lighthouse
on the hill: squall-debris.
The searchlight is hinged to a broken joint.
It swings, throwing its yellow spray
at the storm,
even though salt-blinded;

I felt cheated in the morning.
No canting masts, no shattered
cluttered the beach. I had slept through
half the storm, equanimous as Buddha.
I should have dreamt
of blood-red sails, sunken ships
twisted, skeletal ghost-sailors
dropping from bits of rigging,
and eye-sockets
turning into an hourglass.
In the meadows of love
crowbar and crucifix,
the beat of death
in the flowering heart of life.
Sea, 1 look for fungus and rot
even in you, your floorboards putrefying
till ocean and underworld are one.

Instead, two mornings later,
this 180 degree arc
of rose and mauve,
this fleet of dawns weighing anchor.
The sea and the sky, two concaves
mirroring each other,
two giant wings of a purple moth,
a rose-pink oar looking for a boat,
a lilac axe-blade looking for a treeline.
The gulls were not there nor their cries
nor the angry rhythm of their wings.

1 ask the villagers, surely some sea-myth
must have latched itself to this coastal shelf,
some octopus-king gliding
through palaces of luminous coral;
stories of piracies perhaps,
of a Zamorin dropping anchor.
Surely there must have been a temple here
to a fish-eyed goddess
covered with barnacles?
No, they shake their heads, no one remembers
seeing a myth die
amidst a shoal of dancing bubbles.
Nothing here but the colossal
undulations of the sea,
changing from green to shimmering jade.