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Intertidal Zone

‘What are you saying’? the voice behind the camera shifts
and is mouthed across a levee bank, only the trace of clayed footprints
wind through the mangroves. Following - our shoes suck and lift.
sandflies crowd close to pneumatophores, light glares from the hint
of water shallowed here on the last high tide. In leaves of dull
grey, olive greens, remembering the words of a workmate ‘mangroves –
colourless, dead spaces’.
Sorting rebukes: for here is the landscape full
of bodily sounds, heaving itself fricative and hoarse reinventing terrain over
and again with each shifting hour. Conscious of the small hours
left for fishing they cast and re-bait as frequently as fly fisherman.
Isolate shadows lick at the lengthening curve of bay, Eastern Curlews carouse
with Pied Oystercatchers siphoning muds for worms and molluscs. A small tinny pans

and shimmies out toward the Corio mouth. Disappear… stay with us … a voice hums
foetid and moist tongued. Scents of decay claw and rise quick with water when it comes

Mangrove roots in water

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