BEACH DEMOCRACY

Millions

Green and cream trams, with a solid gold stripe,

and almost as flash,

I used to think, as next year’s bus,

were the transports to the joy,

for me and my aunt,

of the Bondi Beach Christmas carnivals.

There was enough, it seemed, in those days,

for two. I had enough for millions.

I used to look forward all year round to the Ferris Wheel,

and its lights rising in stately rotations

like stars about a celestial pole. But I’d also dream

of the Wheel buckling, of the lights toppling,

and bodies

shooting down from the sky

like Roman candles. So I wouldn’t go near

or let my aunt stand beneath it. Fear

at that age is absolute. And private. Safer

by far to risk

a few pennies on Satan’s long mechanical arm

sweeping across crowds of glistening prizes

to pick up a packet of Craven A

you never knew what to do with. The risk’s the thing!

And the music! How much

was that doggy in the window?

Who ever knew? So you lose your

face in fairy floss,

in its pale pink webs

that stick to your specs

like spider’s fluff –

Going home, my aunt would recall

a more complete gaiety, its original,

when joy and its pavilions

were entirely new, and had yet to know

the neglects of Depression.

Back then, fun still stretched out on piers, almost

to the far side of the world, almost

to the absolute of fun

that her mother spoke of, on Brighton Pier,

before all piers fell victim to the amputations of war.

And as our tram wound back up Birriga Road

my aunt could never help but wonder:

How much joy was left to come before the world would end?

And how many, then, would know times like these again?

Pinke Zinke

We would lie stretched across January,

inviolate, safe behind our masks

of Pinke Zinke, hatching horizons

like turtle’s eggs that

struggle down the beach

to lose themselves in a world called the ocean.

Pinke Zinke, at first just a sign,

became the symbol of our gathering.

And in that Bondi of blazing days, tomorrow

always just meant the next day

with a red neck disported around school like a hangover:

the ultimate badge of having been there.

Our gathering grew, spread

around the Pinke Zinke sign

like ants milking a drop of honey.

“Others”

we cast in moulds of ghastly undesirability,

like the bodies they dug from Pompeii’s ruin.

Going home, the heat

would rise through your thongs,

like the memory of some outstanding stupidity

you’d committed; and the towel round your neck

hung like a necklace of guilt –

the surf had washed off only the sweat.

Beach Economy

It’s not so easy to get out of,

Bondi, to get take off

in the face of its dead-still heat,

and a life

as flat

as a westerly-stilled surf –

It has you standing around,

scratching your head among malibus,

that peer out over the ute-tops like ships boys

trapped in a crows-nest,

panning the dead-pan blue

for the sign of a break –

In those days, Bondi was still a haunt for flightless birds –

Kiwis left stranded on the Bondi strand

leadening themselves

in the economy of its simple hedonism,

happiness paralysed

by the tyrant sun –

Aristocrats of the Sun

Fetching croissants on the sunrise boulevard,

early one Saturday morning,

an advertising man has redrawn your mood

in the vivid primaries from his gorgeous palate:

so Aphrodite’s reborn in the Bondi foam

in broad daubed slabs

of contemporary desire –

But you are there already. Already inside his poster.

The sharp bickering of gulls, riding down the land-breeze

breaks in on your meditation,

ruffles your imagination,

with a dash of

nouvelle cuisine

distinct

and piquant, isolate

in acres of hungry white flesh.

At that time, only joggers parade the littoral,

restoring the beach, like iron wrought to lace,

a Paddington terrace. You see other bodies later

glaring coppertone sun

back at itself, as if flexed

in sensual combat

to grab their moment, their place in the sun.

The Meeting Place

We go there late in the afternoon,

now and then,

to stroll the baby, and

lick pleasure

from the Gelato Bar. There is peace,

some evenings,

after a storm, when children

flit across the scalloped staves of wrack

like the demi-semi-quavers

of a difficult, glistening passage.

Their mamas and papas have taken the promenade

by force of arms, like

at twilight in Brindisi. And

from the huddled shore,

we expand into the view of the bay’s crescent

like someone breathing lightly across a mirror:

the horizon is low and present, the sea,

mauve with mist; last sunlight

flattens the block-jungle

over on Ben Buckler where there’s no real perspective –

this is the clarity of within a bubble,

draining light stretched as thin as irony –

then the ivory of the waiting moon.