Hong Kong, Beach Ode. Poem by Ananta Madhavan

Deep Water Bay. An hour to sunset.
Acres of skin are browning on the beach.
The gambols of the young are not yet ended.
A fat boy lathers the surf.
Three rock-still girls rise up and rush into the waves,
Bob with the charging swell,
Thrill to the splash between their legs,
And underfoot the tickle of its abduction.

Craft of pumped rubber dare the deep
Beyond the marker-fence where speed-boats curve,
With slanted skiers taut and skimming proud,
Like Romans riding chariots to battle.

Swimmers crowd the floating platform isle.
Those at the rim peel off. A leaper's dive,
Arrested by the distant eye, revokes
The laws of gravity and consequence,
Holding up the moving arc like a gem.
Action is metaphor of itself,
The verb congealed and framed in memory,
Needing no noun for buttress.

Passive and active, land and sea
Pulsate with rhythms of immobility,
Slower than human time, deeper, graver
Than body growth or catabolism.
I who have learned to laze upon the sand
And soak the sun without a buzzing thought
Pay my languid tribute to a time
Of brooding presences:
The hills' amphitheatre, the hump-back island.

The restless sea obeys no metronome,
But stirs to many-cycled beats at once;
Its tugs and tides and meretricious waves,
Outlasting man and rock and fish and rhyme,
Yet in its plural pace an exemplar
Of my own unmeshing synchrony-
Recurrent hungers of the guts and mind,
The seasons of the loins, the heart's eons.

The sun is tamed and tempered.
The junks are moth-like silhouettes;
The green on the golf course cools,
The bus sucks up a homeward queue,
A child licks ice, a youth strolls by,
His dank hair spangled on his nape.
A slender woman with a burnished thigh
(Her face in planes, her body all in curves)
Gets up, collects her bag and leaves,
Removing thus a focus for my lechery.
Now I can see more sand than skin about.
I cup my hand around a fist of sand;
It is like sediments of sugar, will not run
Granular through my waisted hourglass.

This moment will not fall or pass,
It is particular,
Containing all my universe, uniquely so,
Absurd, without a purpose or an end
But for this investiture of 'useless passion'.

- - - - - 1975
'L'homme, c'est une passion inutile.' J-P.Sartre