The Searoad

Where are they going? Where waterspouts lower their silver 
taproots into the vanishing point of a Tasman searoad, 
read the ocean’s internal workings by what happens 
on the surface, in ulcerous light, in the wake of a longliner: 

Wandering albatross reeled in like trolled marionettes 
with hooks in their beaks; Southern Bluefin tuna
hauled from a wave to be brain-spiked and opened 
by men in yellow raingear, who work like coroners 

in the hold of a warship hospital, lowering flesh barrels 
into liquid nitrogen. Walk the aisles of markets, 
where swordfish are dumped like deflating blue rubber 
in a glitter of ice and flies. And when the keel 

of an ocean-going racing yacht opens a whale’s back 
the way some over-ripe fruit will split to the stone 
when the tip of a paring knife is drawn over the skin, 
the whale rolls, and the crew curse another sea-touring log 

until the boat’s wake clouds with blood 
like a red spinnaker blooming underwater. 
They do not say, with grief like a sea-noise behind their words: 
Charismatic megafauna are great entertainers!

Where are they going? Into stories and documents
written on coastal parchment and leaked as slime 
to currentlines dark with profit, into driftnets 
and gill nets, into reef structure levelled by years 

of trawling operations. Entering a pulse of light 
in the brain-stem of a cardinal marker, a dugong 
blows an orange sand trumpet and rolls away, trailing 
seagrass like spooled magnetic tape, and further back, 

autoa small white cylinder wired for satellite tracking. 
Where are they going? Watch closely. The world’s 
largest seabird is entering a high pressure system 
inside The Roaring Forties. It will glide for days 

until booby-trapped squid divide the sea and turn 
the glide into a drag. Behind a bait school 
large as an oval, Bluefin tuna are working like surface-
feeding stock dogs as the baitfish change to razor wire 

inside their speeding mouths. A dugong tries 
to outswim its own shadow, and is overtaken.
They are going beyond the range of echo-sounders 
and spotter planes to surface somewhere 

inside our heads, vaguely luminous, like memory loss; 
like those gold circles that appear for a moment when, 
absentmindedly, we press the corners of our eyes
and remember.

d