Her body bobs in the undulating harbour waters. Ripples extending from her movement caress a field of seemingly stoic structural timbers holding up a breastwork, a false ground that appropriates the foreshore for the sake of leisure, travel and export.

Oh Eucalyptus marginata, squared shards of giants felled, imported all the way from southwest Australian, where are your feet?

Tell me the tale of your migration, the stories of your saturated existence.

She navigates amongst the Jarrah piles, approaching them as strangers, non-human live matter, respecting their dignity, inspecting the accrual of vegetal growth wrapping their torsos as temporal memorials to seasonal fluctuations. Her attempts at mimicking the timber’s upright posture bear out overtures of empathetic reciprocity.

My feet,

dangling from this plump volume,

have lost their footing.

The water and its salinity are thwarting my ability to be still let alone remain vertical.

This is not swimming; it is attentive floating, a phase change to gravity’s tendency to hold me down, grounded-ness.

A volley of interactions unfold in the shadows of a dank underworld shimmering with reflections of long white clouds agitated by swirls of sediment rising from the depths of seaweed enchantment.

On the sureness of shore, in a shipping container with its doors thrown open, a live stream projection translates such aqueous intercourse to witnesses, an audience.

I can’t maintain this, I give in, I’m going under, going down,

to catch my breath,

to gain strong legs, composure, to tread without touching the bottom.

The conversation between swimmer and piles persists in states of becoming familiar, an exchange only tempered by exhaustion.