Jacobson - The sunlit zone

Lisa Jacobson

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. 3052 www.fiveislandspress.com Cover design: Libby Austen Cover image: Copyright Samantha Everton. 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. 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 Universitys 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 manuscripts 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).

Lisa Jacobsons The Sunlit Zone was shortlisted for the 2009 Victorian Premiers 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 Heinemanns Best Short Stories (U.K.), Peter Porters The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, Scorched: Penguin Australian Summer Stories, Robert Adamsons The Best Australian Poems 2010 and Adrian Hylands 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

Anglers Bay, 2050 There are few, or no, bluish animals. Henry Thoreau All Saturday afternoon I watch through my front window the blue whale thats beached itself amidst drifts of kelp on the foreshore of Anglers Bay. Volunteers stream in like diaspora, dissipate.

Waverley will be there, for sure. Shed 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. north, cybes Waverley, where r u? This is the third whale stuck this week. 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, Im doing stuff. c u.

The carbon counter on the wall reads 2. You have exceededyour 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. Its therapy. I sit amidst the rubble on my desk: heat sweets, God Junk, a lone earring, lilac pebbles from a resort beach. Its 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 cant 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.

But its hard to work with that damn whale wedged in on sand. Poor blue bugger, big as a pub, stranded on some ancestral path.

Its just a clone, I think. No ones 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.

I take last nights 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 fashion accessory. Best friend, bought cheap from a Gen Pets laboratory.

Theres 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 doors 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.

Not much. As usual. As usual.

The news subedited by hackers before it even reaches me. On Beijings latest Dome Show hit, Man in the Moon, a bunch of pretty Chinese undergrads float weightless in their lunar home. By then its 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.

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 seas washed in. Bear gives a deep, full-throated bark and navigates it cautiously. A dozen rescue volunteers attend the whales boulder head. The moods funereal. I nod hello. But theres not much that anyone can do, though Waverley persists, beetling along the whales flanks with her hydro kit like an extra terrestrial stick insect.