THE BEACH REPORT, 5-1-17

Serving "who's the coffee? tea?" to the table --would have thought i'd know by now, lad laughs --but i didn't know or remember he wasn't English backpacker for in this moment i'm sure he's Greek, especially if over-familiar man under further canopy of kiosque forecourt, adjacent to concrete esplanade & the beach, is the dad? Ah, couldn't be! --mebee related to the little Greek family business, --partner? --a regular customer, little business's esteemed 'regular', every day of the  season like old-timers in pub hoping for a pot on the house, picking up the dead glasses & carafes, this guy gathers tea & coffee cups like kiosque's best girl or boy, otherwise sits at a table, grey & white fluffy dog at his feet, -- he reads the paper, drinks his coffee, pecks doughnut or chip, converses with whomever's closest, the weather, the government…

Only the third attendance of the summer yet seems the British & Europeans aren't here, working or playing. Index of world economy --less travel-money, change of visa requirements, reduced energy, curiosity. Instead, different leagues of local --arrived such & such a year, live in that street, suburb, or came after, but long enough to establish cactus in rockery, privet bush above subterranean car-port --or always wuz 'ere, almost original, like Arthur, Peg Cregan's husband  --his all-seasons' browned legs --like Peg herself --that is, Arthur like Peg, her standard, sockless, sandals --his Diet Ale, her claret --dressed up when he had to be --Australian Railways Union business --but at home, whoever was around, in his garden shorts, colourful shirt flapping --easy in his own skin --seen & heard it all yet attentive, curious, for duration of any conversation --Peg's poets, painters, musicians, --eccentrics --his trade unionists --all of 'em their comrades… "Look at this house Mr Brezhnev" i had him saying in The Poem of the Clear Eye (1972/3), "a worker's house comrade a bloody mansion!" --as too the prettiest terrace on Victoria Parade, "(with blistered feet i come to savour your cool / ness Princess at the offices of Amalgamated / Engineers (our Movement / the beer & mighty bulls refined by / a frieze of realistic art & discourse / Watan & Counihan the mild Jack Hutson the dreaded / Carmichael the gallant O'Neill the last Paraguayans / mate & mate mopping up blood of comrades in Jakarta every / where" --and why have i been thinking of him recently? --figures of age, of ageing, of the older into which one's moved unintentionally…

And the floppy beach hat i retrieve from the water after my dip --thought it was a jelly fish --like one of Arthur's --no tickets, that's what it is, talking about the Australian character, --any kind of hat, anything'll do, anything if it does the job, --sounding like Lawrence now narrating Kangaroo --British but without the pettier class reflexes, imposed & reversed snobbery --Jack as good as his master --shock of the colonial new --one can be lighter there, my Lawrence says, --refreshed, renewed, and transformed --transformation in the fullest brightest light, not a smidgin of the ambivalent dark, dark sun & et cetera --imagine him, his surrogate, intuiting, sounding off like that. It's a child's hat. Yours? i indicate to sporty man striding towards me along the water line. No! he laughs, not mine! Slim girl in bikini actually rises from her sunbathing beside us & suggests the owner's to be found among the group of little kids & adults previously playing in our vicinity --screaming, in & out the water after dad has rafted three lucky ones to deeper water & back. She's right. Not that the mother immediately claimed it --but one of the five children did, raising hand as though in yesteryear's classroom --it's mine, she said… And that was that...