Annamaria Weldon

Chronic Castaway

Deskbound, unfolding the island map, I wrote the island’s coves and caves from memory

Chronic Castaway

1

Leaving the archipelago, I wept
inside, but kept a map, haptic, sensory,
smells of the jetty at night, wavelets’ lap,
rhythmic below the boards, sea-splashed pylons,
salt-glint of shells in damp nets spread to dry.

Memory’s sanctuary: full moon suspended
tangerine on black; reef colonies;
pelagic fish, their secret life I long
to share again, if only I were well,
could still breathe underwater. An ill storm
made me a chronic castaway. Mainland
ways feel harsh, hurried, loud. New hazards loom,
fresh diagnoses plot my body-chart.
No rock-pools to break my falls, only hard ground.

2

The Abrolhos were my haven. There, escape
was a species of healing. Existence
among spare vegetation, resilient
creatures was enough I thought, seduced by
island-time, blind to the reciprocity
of ocean life, misreading it as simple.

Past the coastal edge, on land-sea’s ecotone
those outliers are heirs of a wilderness.
Once my refuge, now it keeps me at bay.

Morning Reef’s sea-birds wheel, flutter, fearlessly
dive down to the abyss which teems with fish
restlessly darting through marine canyons.
I crave their aqueous existence, world
without end. Or at least, without sickness.

3

Deskbound, un-folding the island map, I
wrote the island’s coves and caves from memory.

Taboo places, explored, that beckoned, drew
me into a time-fissure where sequence
slipped in the missed beat between a single thought
and its breath. I was tranced and enchanted
by the liminal, where two worlds overlap.

In reverie’s flow I followed desire
paths to lost boundaries, faint clues, thresholds.

Once again, sundial shadows unspooled, wind
vanes reversed. My vital signs and symptoms
which track the ever-present prognosis
were banished as I transcended all pain.

4

I have grown so tired of translating scans,
acronyms, ambiguous calligraphies,
doctors’ prescriptions. Of on-shore culture,
its addiction to data.

Though at times
on the islands, which are one evolutionary
step above sandbanks, visitors obsessed
by taxonomies would list their catch like
solemn train spotters: Trout (Rainbow, Coral)
Dhufish, Baldchin groper. Quote dates, times,
reefs, islands: Wallabi, Easter, Pelsaert.

We colonise the wild with language, chronic
claimants of all natural things which don’t
belong to us and once thrived undivided
by our borders, coordinates, isobars.

5

In shallow shoal waters, the silent dance
of complex, cross-species symbiosis
sustaining microscopic life would seem
surreal to us, if bare eyes could see it.

Mobile, bright algae housed inside polyps
of sessile coral rise sunwards to sip
light, photosynthesize and feed their host,
which being animal, can’t make energy.

All flourishing is mutual. A far cry
from these islands’ haunting history: how
Batavia, the Dutch navy’s proud flagship
on her maiden voyage, laden with spoils,
330 souls, devilry and greed,
was foiled by darkness, reef-foundered and sank.

6

Blue coral grew over her lost cannons,
rotten timbers colonised as habitat
by sea creatures bound in life-death-life cycles.
Mostly death. The climate’s wounds are fatal.

Algae, threatened by heating shallows, flee
the reefs, taking all colour with them. Or
violent storms drag them from their hosts. Helpless
against such harm, fade is their only verb.

Although I have no cure and can never
go back, words keep my sanctuary alive
and now I have even more need of it
than before. I read its memory-map,
wondering what we could change if we knew
the ruin of continuing to live as we do.

*

The barometer is falling.

My body is a micro-climate, brews
its own tempests. The chronically sick
know a coming storm’s signs: how the air
turns heavy, thick, moving an effort.
 
I share a weather-forecaster’s vigilance.
We watch parallel systems, know prodromes
at first sight: hot humidity slicks all surfaces
like sweat. Time pauses. Premonition prickles.
Meteorologists consult their charts. I watch the light.
 
As the sky grows darker, outlines sharpen
backlit by luminous blue. Vivid and electric
it emanates from inside everything in sight-
 clouds, rocks, my splayed fingers – dances
in the tall trees like fire in the rigging.
 
At the weather station they are counting
isobars, tracking the fall in atmospheric
pressure. Numbers are our mantras.
At the clinic, I feel the inflatable cuff
tight on my arm. The nurse reads and records.
 
We’re all searching for propitious patterns
as though they were soothsayers.
My glistening brow, hot neck feel clammy,
but cold to touch. It begins like this,
each flare-up brings a season of paradox.
 
The newsreader describes the coming storm
as erratic, landfall hard to predict.
Will it strengthen to cyclone force? I live
at a safe distance from those rising winds
 My maelstrom’s inside, invisible.
 
I hug my pillows. Up North they fill sandbags.
We share this: inhabit a dangerous coast,
mapped as a warning, not an invitation.
It wasn’t a choice. Who wants to be ill?
Who wants to face the elements’ fury?
 
We live on the edge of normal, our gaze
focused offshore, reading wave after wave.
And yet, such intimacy with nature
saves me: frailty opened my eyes
to the sublime, a beauty terrible and wild.
 
I seek it with my camera and pen. Poems,
photos to ward off despair. Talismans
I keep by my bed. I look at one now,
all sky and water, vivid luminous air.
Translucent, glassy gradations of blue
 
light from a bruised horizon to the shore
where I am one with the coming storm,
my boundaries so thinned by constant pain
that I feel weather’s generative energy
inside, an electric urge to create,
 
which comes of knowing life’s fragility.
 
  *

An ill storm made me a chronic castaway.

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