2002 winner

final belief/

                    must be in a fiction
                                            (Wallace Stevens)

To pass the time, or for other, hidden reasons,
Melville tells us, sailors practised scrimshaw,
meticulously scraping out the captured bone
to put a trace back in, perhaps the outline of a walrus

or a scene from home. There are artists who include
almost everything, and others who take it all away,
as if the looming might exist in what is yet to come
or what's already gone, as if a voice

could rise

standing at a wall, footprints twice the size of mine
crossing half the beach, fragments that work like art
where, up close, you see the intentions of the palette knife,
the underdrawing, the vermilion in a field of sand.

There's more than just aesthetic difference
between the instamatic image prospectively installed
and the slow permutations of the daguerreotype,
time making space in a different way, a changeling

getting used to transformation. Somewhere,
in the great expanse of blue, there's the lamentation
of a great white whale, a demented captain
with a wooden leg, and the spoor of an imagined beast.

by Brook Emery

Brook Emery has worked as a swimming instructor, beach inspector, removalist and, for a long time, as an English and History teacher. He lives in Sydney and is studying for a PhD at Newcastle University.