The Sunlit Zone
Lisa Jacobson
© Lisa Jacobson 2012
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study and research, criticism, review, or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.
Published by Five Islands Press.
F.I. Press Inc
PO Box 4429
University of Melbourne
Parkville Vic. 3052
www.fiveislandspress.com
Cover design: Libby Austen
Cover image: Copyright © Samantha Everton. Image supplied courtesy of Anthea Polson Art.
Five Islands Press would like to thank the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, for their assistance.
Digital conversion by Aleksandr Tuza, alektuza.com.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publications entry
Lisa Jacobson
The Sunlit Zone
ISBN: 978-0-7340-4746-5
1. Title
A821.3
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Five Islands Press and its editorial team, Kevin Brophy, Lyn Hatherly, Michael McKay and Katia Ariel, for enabling me to bring this work to publication.
Several organisations also require acknowledgement: The Marten Bequest, whose Travelling Scholarship took me to the shores of the Red Sea where the first few pages of the book were written, La Trobe University’s English Program and The Institute for Advanced Study at La Trobe.
Many people who were instrumental in the writing of this book may well have forgotten just how useful they were. In particular, I want to thank Richard Freadman, Catherine Padmore, Alison Ravenscroft and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
Many friends, colleagues and family members have in various ways assisted with the manuscript’s development. These include Annette Barlow, Beverley Farmer, Catherine Harris, Antoni Jach, Steven Jacobson, Rosaleen Love, Lynne Kelly, Eric King-Smith and Ronnith Morris. There are others who, due to my flawed memory and the passage of time, shall have to remain unnamed – to you I also extend my gratitude.
I would like to acknowledge my parents to whom this book is dedicated, as well as David Tacey and Hayley Austen who put their own needs aside so that it might be finished.
An extract from The Sunlit Zone previously appeared in Refashioning Myth: Poetic Transformations and Metamorphoses, edited by Jessica Wilkinson, Eric Parisot and David McInnis (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011).
Biographical note
Lisa Jacobson’s The Sunlit Zone was shortlisted for the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. An earlier poetry collection, Hair & Skin & Teeth, was published by Five Islands Press in 1995 and shortlisted for the National Book Council Awards. She has been awarded the 2011 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, the HQ/Harper Collins Short Story Prize, a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, and an Australia Council Grant to complete her next poetry collection. Her poetry and fiction have been published in Australia, New York and London. Her work is represented in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories (U.K.), Peter Porter’s The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, Scorched: Penguin Australian Summer Stories, Robert Adamson’s The Best Australian Poems 2010 and Adrian Hyland’s Kinglake 350. She has studied literature at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities, and remains an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe. She shares a bush block in Melbourne with her partner and daughter. Please refer to www.lisajacobson.org for further information.
for my parents
the sunlit zone:
a shallow but complex layer of ocean in which vegetation
flourishes most prolifically, and which the deep sea
diver must keep in her sights
if she is to return to it
Contents
Whale
Salt
Star fish
Skin
Cake
Hair
Boat
Pier
Fruit
Bones
Milk
Ash
Breath
Teeth
Soil
Waves
Home
Sources for the epigraphs
Part 1: Whale
Angler’s Bay, 2050
There are few, or no, bluish animals.
Henry Thoreau
1
All Saturday afternoon I watch
through my front window
the blue whale that’s beached itself
amidst drifts of kelp on the foreshore
of Angler’s Bay. Volunteers stream
in like diaspora, dissipate. Waverley
will be there, for sure. She’d nurse
a sea slug if it were beached.
Already the tides are sliding back
into a field of waves that reflect
the darkness of Melbourne in July.
A tensile wall restrains the sea
but not the view. This flat is on
the second floor. My skinfone glows.
—north, cybes Waverley, where r u?
This is the third whale stuck this week.
I helped out with the other two.
—sorri mate, I cybe, I’m doing stuff. c u.
2
The carbon counter on the wall
reads –2. You have exceeded
your carbon limit for this week.
I drag a woolly jumper on,
push back the too-long sleeves
my mum knitted. Her house robot
could easily crank out one of these.
—But North, she says. It’s therapy.
I sit amidst the rubble on my desk:
heat sweets, God Junk, a lone earring,
lilac pebbles from a resort beach.
Words glimmer on my lobal screen
I can’t quite, almost, read.
I refocus until the text solidifies,
notations made in my brain scrawl.
I save the imprint and proceed.
Soon dusk crawls in.
3
But it’s hard to work with that damn
whale wedged in on sand. Poor blue
bugger, big as a pub, stranded on some
ancestral path. It’s just a clone, I think.
No one’s sighted a real whale for years.
The bay has been restocked since then
with GM replicas, but they just keep on
beaching. One whale calls the whole
herd in. Five hundred Southern Rights
were bled at Warrnambool last year.
The sickly, death-sweet funeral smoke
filled every home. The sand is thick
with ash and bone.
4
I take last night’s leftover pasta,
whack it in the Laser Wave
and fill a bowl with dog pellets.
—Sit, Bear, I say. Slowly, Bear sits,
lowering his blue rump to the tiles
and whumping his thick tail.
Bear: designer dog gone wrong,
unwanted f
ashion accessory.
Best friend, bought cheap
from a Gen Pets laboratory.
There’s not much room for him
but I have a Bear-sized flexi flap.
Week days he spends in the garden
below our flat with next door’s
ultraviolet cat. I eat my dinner
on the couch, tune in to Web City.
Bear scoffs his meal and plonks down
at my feet, eyeing my pasta mournfully.
5
Not much. Just crap. As usual.
The news subedited by hackers
before it even reaches me.
On Beijing’s latest Dome Show hit,
Man in the Moon, a bunch of pretty
Chinese undergrads float weightless
in their lunar home. By then it’s ten.
I kill the screen and wake up Bear.
—Come on, boy.
He galumphs towards the flexi flap.
I push him through. He sniffs night
air and cocks a leg against the gate.
We head down to the shore.
6
No moon tonight, just pale and rheumy
stars. The desalination plant casts green
light on a continent of gleaming sand.
The tide is out. Bear snuffs at kelp,
rubbish, leaps over luminous jellyfish.
The beached whale looms ahead like
a fabulous fruit the sea’s washed in.
Bear gives a deep, full-throated bark
and navigates it cautiously. A dozen
rescue volunteers attend the whale’s
boulder head. The mood’s funereal.
I nod hello. But there’s not much
that anyone can do, though Waverley
persists, beetling along the whale’s
flanks with her hydro kit like an extra
terrestrial stick insect. Her hair springs
up in a crazy frizz. When Bear spots
Waverley, he leaps with ravenous joy and slobbers on her scrawny neck.
—Oh Bear, my Bear, she croons.
He flops, drooling.
7
The whale’s vast flank feels smooth
and chill as long-life meat. The skin
secretes a fishy smell that’s just a bit
too strong, like bait in buckets
stewing on the pier. It’s just a clone,
I tell myself again. Waverley strokes
its big grey head, the spout expelling
ropey exhalations that diminish,
fray and thin. Then, nothing.
The whale’s eye, dark as a lake
and sorrowful. Everything stops.
Even the waves cease muttering
and all is still. The eye empties
as if a plug’s been pulled.
We watch as it recedes
into opaqueness.
Part 2: Salt
Angler’s Bay, 2020
You do not have to be good …
You only have to let the soft animal
of your body love what it loves.
Mary Oliver
1
Flora and Richard were pissed,
stumbling out of the Wharf Hotel
on a warm night in October.
At the end of the pier’s long arm
they sat and kissed, entwined
in lapping darkness. Backwards
and laughing my parents fell
onto the wharf’s uneven planks
that smelt of salt and whitebait,
neither of them young or naive.
Flora unzipped the blue dress
bought especially for this evening,
felt rough wood scrape her back.
Saw or thought she saw twin
moons through scraps of cloud.
Everything ripe, a little hazy,
she abandoned herself to the wild
hard kisses Richard planted almost
inside her, nuzzling her lanky thighs.
Euphoric with wine and the stars,
she drew him up beside her
and slowly let him in.
2
After, on the salt-licked planks,
they gazed at cumulus that glowed
pinkish with dawn. Light spread over
the swollen waves and Flora, her thighs
gently damp, thought: that ought to do it.
My mother was forty-four; too old
for the minutiae of weddings,
the white dress, frothing.
She just wanted children.
Already she felt spermatozoa
twirling inside her, the way starlight
twirls when reflected in water at night.
3
So much about Richard pleased my mother
since they’d met in the school staff-room;
this tall thin man with his half-tucked shirts,
the hair he worried into ginger clumps,
tapping at his keyboard out of fondness
more than efficiency. At fifty-two,
my father still held a wet-eared love
of science contagious to his students;
their chatter falling away the way a rope
falls till its anchor finds the sea bed,
hushed by the miracles he revealed:
fish eyes, sheep hearts, bird embryos.
Flora’s heart lifted.
4
Spring arrived late. November came
and went before a fuzz of wattle
decked the brittle trees. In Flora’s bed
one sheet-strewn afternoon, my parents
lay in a heat-struck swoon, listening
to waves collapse upon the beach,
the quark of gulls. My mother’s walls
were crammed with art, mostly hers.
—I love the way you paint, my father said
and stroked her heat-damp hair,
sunset-coloured at a new boutique.
Synthetic implants? He didn’t care.
I feel joyful, he said. Fluid, replete.
My mother laughed and, feeling
a new solidity, chose this moment
to reveal what stirred inside.
—I’m pregnant, she said.
Richard inhaled a happy, half sobbed
breath, his face buried into her neck.
5
Angler’s Bay was filling up
with Queenslanders back then
who’d fled, fearing more tsunamis,
and fifty-something grand mums
with their families who found
the city compounds too restrictive.
City kids were polished and expensive;
their bikes too shiny, clothes too new,
their parents grey-coiffed and retired
or soon to be. Seaside sales dropped
rapidly that year although the ocean
here was calm, almost domesticated.
The local residents were courteous
but fixed. They did their shopping
at the local strip while the new mob
shopped online at foodie.net
6
Past quarter acre house blocks,
newly sold, the local kids rode
beat up bikes, rusty with salt
and sand. The streets acquired
a freshly painted, ice cream hue.
Cottages rebuilt or subd
ued
by owners desiring loftier views.
The old salts hunkered down:
Tom’s Fish’n’Chips, Pixie’s Café,
Dot’s Frocks and Bayside Gifts.
The rest sold up or acquiesced
to pet salons, infant boutiques,
chi gung cafés and sushi booths.
Reluctantly, the town made room
for them.
7
Flora and Richard were ring-ins,
neither local nor brand new;
the high school where they taught
kept pace with the town, and grew.
Flora had a bias for oil painting
her colleagues found archaic,
though they’d never say it.
Richard was brought in to replace
Prof Halliwell, the teacher who left
amidst controversy to host a show
on iTV. My father wasn’t looking
but the principal was persuasive.
And the sea beckoned.
8
Designer embryos had been novelties,
expensive options for the privileged
and popular amongst celebrities
until a local company slashed
the cost for each firstborn
and threw in a new electric Ford.
Dream Genes was spawned.
Wistful parents could tick a box
and order in a child who would excel
in law, be strong or fast or just pretty
like little Cello Green next door,
born three months before Finn and me.
She got her face on a swag of zines.
9
Dream Babies, they called them on iTV.
Fertility Clinic and other soaps like this
sprang up quickly. On Quantum
and 60 Minutes, the older scientists
thrashed it out with the newest wave
of graduates, already rich on GM profit.
The Sunlit Zone Page 1