"tidemark" by Jane Gibian [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Jane Gibian is a Sydney poet and librarian, who recently published her fifth collection of poems, Beneath the Tree Line (2021). Gibian's poetry chronicles the internal landscapes of modern city life, and is marked by the subtlety of its details which often accumulate into something more transient and amorphous as they pass through the minds of their speakers.

 

"tidemark" is a great example of this affect: through the clarity and exactness of its details: the "pale baby capsicum forming inside / its dark red mother", the poem leaves us with an impalpable and elusive disquiet, "that part of the beach / pining for home".

 

tidemark

                                                        

you begin here: part of a distant beach
missing its home, a doll’s saucerful
of the cleanest sand sleeping in your ear

grown into something with glairy edges,
a tidemark advancing and receding less
with the disintegration of arctic sea ice

affirmed when you accidentally cut
the pale baby capsicum forming inside
its dark red mother, the centre of a world

to turn around: beneath the surface
dark rocks loom in the glassy water,
further out, mutable peaks of white froth
tease your eyes with dolphins

where you end: that part of the beach
pining for home, and at the centre
an instrumental continuo around which
all other voices circle and rub

 

Comments

[Leah Martinson]

Thank you Mr Moody for introducing sucn highly talented poets, women or clowns, the defendant or a material witness, eloquent or inariculate, whatever, in Austalia!