stepping into the where of the photograph, its 1920s shoreline
only just separated from the driftwood-piled
forest bracketing the actual
ocean, remnants echoed by an upright
set of ex-
jetty sentinels marking the sepia, pre-
forestation of naked farmlands, and what
looks like three people
holding
hands in the foreground. propped against
the present, shelduck-honked sounding
of its shoreline, a palimpsest
of stilt-steppings, gingerly marked for ongoing
erasure,
in the sun’s tidal worrying of mudflats, thick
and long in un-accounted memory,
prior to what. they are still here, the depicted blanks,
unreadable also in the photo-graph’s breeze-blown object-
fragilities, and still behind them, brackish
with seepage, the lagoon equally riverless
,tidal resignations being what they are
