It's a loose procession, nothing formal, just those you knew best, walking a familiar path
to the beach.

Mum keeps your ashes in a box. No need for an elegy. You're an animal after all.

Instead, stories re-emerge

You never failed to recognise this place,
Dad could barely drive under the whines of a pining beast in the back of the car.
I miss that.

Mum spreads you in the sea.

Easy as sending off sediment.

I catch a thought,
everything I overlooked

That living alone in corrupt towers,
nights of sleep without remedy,
left me detached from our imaginings

That you were the guide when my brother and I
were the Shackleton, the Hillary
of these alluring, unchartered regions

That in these lands the marram grass and the buckled pine trees
are the loose threads left from where
Earth is torn away by the savage Pacific

That this was the edge of your world. We grew out of it. Not that you could tell. Not by
that big dumb smile.

One last swim, my brother says.

It's fitting. We used to race you into the waves,
it is too easily forgotten,
bursting onto untamed coastlines
the feeling of sand covering my body,
running beside a spastic golden creature
through sunken dunes, stones, cracked driftwood pillars,
surrounded by everything we made sacred.

Clarrie Macklin