Pete Dunstone

Oceanic

In the car I say, “What’s your accent,” and she tells me and her life story, eleven-minute trip, eleven-minute story. On the return trip I tell her mine—eight minutes. She gives me her number and I promise to call. So on a troubled day in autumn we meet at The Lookout café, sit at the big window overlooking the sea towards America where she’s going to link up all the watery lines in the world, rooting earth to sea, to clouds, to starlight, draw down the divine to a place of no thinking.

roiling seas
noise of the coffee frother
between waves

She’s only read one good book recently—Norwegian Wood by Murakami and have I read it, and I must because she can’t stop reading it; the way he dances words together in a rhythm she just has to tap her foot to and skip around her garden feeling the light in her eyes as she mimes playing piano, her left hand across her body to hit the high notes, then spring, pound and thunder way down to the low.

And how last summer she was in love with a drummer, although I’ll do for now because she doesn’t like places where she can’t see into the shadows, and why she so loves Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and how she’s always wanted to write bum on a wall and did I think Banksy got started like that. But I’ve no idea, my imagination spinning wild with her stories hanging … but then I’ve not told her about you and how I’m trying to forget and failing, how yet again I’m out of my depth.

winter beach
starlight curving over
into the undertow

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About the Author

Pete Dunstone has had a fine art education and many different jobs, finally resting in horticulture. He likes plants, automata, woodworking, and birding in the UK’s Somerset Levels. His poems have appeared in Blithe Spirit, Ephemera, Kingfisher, Failed Haiku, cho, and The Haibun Journal.

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