Turquoise, azure, indigo, blue – and below, the opal of a perfect pearl pools all colours to a translucent whorl. I cannot enter that abstraction of despair, the witch’s mirror in which we disappear to breathe blue water, choke on the sea’s tear. I cannot know how one word – celeste – might yet transpose to liquid syllables below, and sound a glass bell in that deafening hollow. So I watch this small bird that patters with its feet the thin line Peter could not walk for drowning. Fisher of small fry, it flip-flops, grounding the vast sea-level’s intemperate upheavals. Tiny, sparrow-sized, flutter-running thing – on the sea’s blue page, the superscript of a wing.
