The Myth of the Muttering Madman is a project in self-realization.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Wellington Harbour

An old red chug-tug rests wearily at its mooring. It rocks to the lap of ocean tickling its belly and shimmers in reflections along the skirt of it, along the lines where its body enters the deep green sea; the "Sea Lion Wellington". Further out in the open water a smaller sailing vessel crab-walks across the flat plane of reflected sky. A motorised tinny criss-crosses in the other direction. Two tiny life-jacket clad fishermen pose, heads still in a turn, tracking the oystered rock-roughage which is the shore. They speed out to sea, trailing a barely visible wake of white wash. Even further out, more white-sailed craft jostle and tack, up and down-wind. Great hunkering mountain ridges brood behind them, silent and monstrous in their contemplation of this whole harbour scene.

A white gull flattens and rides the air in a flapping of loops and breezy spirals. Beady eyes flicker to scan the shapes beneath her. She is quick. Her feathers are hefty and they shine. She is queen of her scrapdom.

"Strait Shipping" in capitals shouts across the vista between us. This great scrap of metal sluices in a slow tail-slide to angle away and out of the harbour. It breathes great bellyfuls of air to exhale acrid smoke from its many fluted exhaust towers. Smaller ships, like minnows in the shade of some great water monster hurry to give it free passage. Move, or be downtrodden!

1 comment:

Dutchy Hollando said...

Wellington Harbour 2

An old red tugboat rests wearily at it's mooring. “Sea Lion Wellington”. It's yawning hull draws and sighs, red moments of it's reflection jostle between spangled rings of sunlight and the tiny peaks of liquid mountains. As the ropes suddenly ease off, a mob of antic waves strive to raise it's harrowed carcass. At the horizon, flat and instinctively Euclidean, hides a small rowboat, the back of the rower is even more diminutive and toy-like; together they seem neither to gain nor lose ground at the precipice of infinity. Smoldering in flight, a speedboat ricochets across the ocean heads, one, two, three, four; the water convulses in glassy throes, tosses tail and attempts to turn on it's side, but fails to drown it's excitement as a catholic whitewash pads the spread.

A bitter white gull traces rings in the afterwash of an afternoon breeze. She darts down and out, up and in, snatching at idle prey. One of her legs has either been mislaid or is packed away in her ash-bone feathers.

“Strait Shipping”. A steel giant. It slinks into the harbor with a certain blind casualness of the spectacle it's colored cargo creates. Like a hand smoothing creases from an otherwise immaculate table cloth, the cargo ship appeases the bickering waves that spank across it's welded hull, instilling a sense of inevitableness across the water, leaking into the minds that populate the shore.

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