Queenscliff – Sorrento Ferry

Rain changes the way we look at things.

Yesterday was walking on beaches
today the ferry is packed with return-trippers

escaping from caravans and motels.
Empty beaches float past.

Engines shudder as we back and turn
seeming to narrowly miss two cruising yachts.

From our table I can see all three lighthouses
small sticks rising from the end of land branches.

The ferry ploughs between a container ship going in
and the Princess of Tasmania heading out.

Windows mist over with rain and stale breath.
We talk about Joan moving house. My daughter

On the mobile tells me her friend’s child
has been vomiting all night in my house.

The sideways motion in the swell makes my head feel
as though I’ve had too much to drink.

At Sorrento we disembark.
Rain pelts us like hail.

The return trip is calmer

looking out through curved patches
of window wiped with a sleeve.

We pass bathing boxes in Portsea that sell
for the price of a house in Geelong.

All the world is grey, olive green
a white fringe of beach and light sky.

Even the mansions on the cliff tops
look insignificant in this dank chill.

The way we look at things
changes when it rains.

three hours
it takes for a ship to burn
a full-rigged ship with
four masts

two days
out past the Heads
anchored at night off Lorne
bound for Calcutta

Queenscliff lighthouse
thick mist
fills the gap
between water and sky
a white impenetrable porridge
no light of any kind outside the Heads
near the horizon an eerie glow
refracted in droplets of fog
a low moon rising
in the west

Lorne
a green light
close to the burning vessel
seeming phosphorescence or magic
blue rockets in the sky set off by passing ships
flames running up and down the rigging
a rosy aurora australis playing
with a child’s random
whimsicality

At sea
next morning
the ship drifts eastwards
a blackened thing dead as a cormorant
bits of black wings hanging
from the decks

by afternoon
spars and wreckage
a danger to other shipping
float in large quantities
on the water