Descartes at Bell’s Beach - Peter Goldsworthy

In the tumbling rough
beyond the crumbling edges
of the great white sea,
there is the rock
and roll of heavy water
amplified against the drumskins
of the mind and body
as if against a single drum.
Out there the world is wild and sonic,
my eyes are ears, my mouth
an ear, my jostled limbs
four tiny bones inside
a common ear, transmitting
sound, buffeting white noise
against the tight-stretched inner skin
until, abruptly, from the past,
the lick of earth: a mother’s
rough sandpaper tongue,
and from the debris
of another highrise wave
collapsed expertly on itself,
I emerge, at least, on absent legs,
wearing nothing, not even
my own defeated skin,
numbed until the world
begins to creep back in
dividing self and body
into problems: bruised
shoulders, power-sanded
knees, salt-stung eyes,
and somewhere deep within,
the tiny mind,
straining once again
to hear the glow of cold.