Poem

Harbour

by Judith Bishop •

September 2022, no. 446

Poem

Harbour

by Judith Bishop •

September 2022, no. 446

As if
the black window
at the solitary pass
from I to this (or you or now)
could let a human mind
slip through the glass
once,
let’s practise seeing water,
looking hard at the harbour,
that detritus of worn
mussel shells, rock ledges
graffitied
with an ecstasy
of lichen, waves
writing out the riddles
of harmonics,
breath held
for a moment
as Elizabeth Bishop
in her posthumous voice
says cold dark deep
and absolutely clear
to the innermost air,
despite the murky distance,
surfacing
grey like a wandering seal,
as our minds try
colluding with existence
in a fantasy
of what we might
be doing, or imagining
we do, standing at the sheer
bald windows of our corneas,
beside a grey
harbour on a careful
winter day, feeling
sharpened, conjugal
and stuck

Judith Bishop

By this contributor

Judith Bishop is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Event (Salt, 2007) and Interval (UQP, 2018), and three limited edition chapbooks, including Here Hear (Life Before Man, 2022). A third poetry collection, Circadia, is forthcoming from UQP in 2024. Judith’s awards include the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize forInterval and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2006, 2011). Her poems have been used as lyrics for compositions including Jane Stanley’s ‘14 Weeks’ for the Glasgow School of Art Choir (2023), ‘The Indifferent’ for the Hermes Experiment (2024), Andrew Ford’s ‘Isolation Hymn’ (2021), and Mastaneh Nazarian’s ‘Aubade’ (2019). Judith lives in Melbourne, Australia, and has studied in the United States and Britain. She currently works in Advancement at La Trobe University and is writing a book about AI and human data.