How many summers do we get? how many cats eyes will pierce our feet,? How many freckles will I have? how many wild yellow flowers will sweep and carpet the salt kissed grassy hills? The southerly winds will come regardless, rattling across the sea to cool and settle our worried little hearts, and just like that… through the tropes of our youth we put away childish things. I have however spent my life trying to return to innocence.
forte
To kick hard off the ocean floor is first to swim down to the piano nobile and meet with sea grass and fish, rays and urchins, cowries and star fish. A rite of passage, oceanic stripes and tidal drag, torrents of impulse and intimate navigation. The sea grass leans and reels outward towards kissing the network of a gropers tail then shivering across the contours of a rock shelf, compounding and eroding the scarped and beguiling terrain of existence.
two belly’s of water proudly book-end an almost drawn curtain of rock-shelf but for a slender chasm splitting the matter and giving us a glimpse to the anomalous beauty that operates bellow. The gulls see a kinked shimmering spinal column , a fractured and complex safe guard for the life that burgeons below. Beneath this glinting artery is the architecture of a cave, decorated corridors where no howling can be heard and only the start is found. Dormant memoirs flash and rattle through us shuttering frame by frame like quicksilver film processing between the staccato clockwork of our stunning panic . It’s like a backwards music lesson as we suck and fill our lungs to begin again and again before swimming from the first pool deep down into the oceans basement which was everything to me then.
And we were so young
and it really was only a green tunnel where yellow stars flick on and off
like bed lamps.
and the change rooms held terrazzo floors and pink ceramic sinks
and back home were blankets of wool knitted by great aunts
and ash trays sat on the kitchen table and the perpetual batterie of beef stock, plums and beer were held in the garden shed fridge
lattice and roses
flannel sheets on the line
I reached out to purchase the rock wall when the ocean pumped another charged current of life affirming swell into the grotto across my heart and open eyes. The smallest of seconds felt like a life time as we became evident out and into the final pool gasping for air and broadcasting with new resolution.
My daughter says that when she places a sea shell to her ear she not only hears the sea but also the sound of children playing….
maybe it’s us from summers passed,
in the halls of our youth
we are pianos and trombones laid out on the sea shore
the weight of notation
the sound of memory
– James Drinkwater, February 2025
Image: With Salvation 2025, found objects with brass lettering, 28 x 30 x 27 cm
