It’s Why She Gave Me The Painting – The Wednesday Poem

It’s Why She Gave Me the Painting

My arrival in the foreground marks the spot

where his easel stood, overlooking Seaford Bay.

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Immersed in watery blue light, I want to scramble

down to the sea, but my legs won’t move.

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A smudge of scuffed-white teenage shoes confirms the canvas

remembers me. I stand on daisy-dotted grass. Clouds pass overhead.

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Martello Tower, beach huts, line of wind-battered houses stretch

along the promenade, small and perspective-faint in the distance.

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Pencil sketches are visible through the greenie-greys as if

the sea hurled and swamped skeletal structures in a cold dull wash.

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I watch dark-coated people lean into the wind. Search for a familiar

face, but each oval shape is blank as parchment. Long gone, I guess.

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There’s a rolling repetition of waves. I focus on the lines of froth.

Years ago, I dived through and through to the other side of the earth.

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Never returned. Don’t know why.

But it’s why she gave me the painting.

* Carolyn Abbs

Carolyn Abbs’s collection The Tiny Museums is published with UWAP, 2017, and Highly Commended in the Dorothy Hewett Award. Her poems appear in the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, ABR, Australian Poetry Journal, Axon, Best Australian Poems 2014, Cordite, Westerly and other places. Her new collection, Why She Gave me the Painting, will be launched at the State Library of WA Lecture Theatre on Sunday 9 February at 2pm.

You can learn more about Carolyn Abbs and hear her discuss her poetry right here on our Poets Paddock podcast with Carolyn Abbs.

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