Last night after another 40-something day I went down to the beach. And after swimming spotted something moving in the shadows on the sand not far from a couple of people nearby. It took a while to register its form and movements as it appeared near the waterline and moved back towards the dunes. It glided easily on all fours, silently, looking around, smelling the ground, untroubled, unbothered by humans. A fox. It trotted along the sand in the hot night, going almost as far as the dunes before stopping, and slowly slinking in the direction of another person, on their phone, not noticing. Then it stopped, lay down. The person picked up their stuff and moved off. I walked back towards the car parks. I caught up with the person and asked if he’d seen the fox. He looked back as it picked itself up from the shadows and bounced across in the direction in which he’d been sitting. “No,” he said, sounding suprised. “Never seen one here. Are they dangerous?”

This morning I was driving home, further along the coast, next to a break they call isolaters, and noticed a raptor hovering above the dunes. It was all white except the black undersitde of its wingtips, it’s beak and eye, and, when it dived a little or hovered higher, a black patch also on its shoulders. And so we name things—a black shouldered kite. It hovered effortlessly as the wind rolled round its wings, looking from time to time straight, then right, its head pointed into the southwesterly, the whole city cooling a little. It rose again, adjusted, went a little to the side, then dropped slowly, its talons extended, before pausing, rising again, then turning left, flying over where I was parked.

This shoreline, this salty shoreline, is one of the cunning, and of the head, be it canine or bird or a hundred other things. This shoreline, this heady salty shoreline is a shoreline of death.

Another strato-cumulus rumpled underbelly of grey cloud blanket, with wind from southwest; a cooler morning though still summer warm. The high tide line barely makes it over the frontline shoreline wall to the south end of the beachy bay. A smoothed cliff formation ridge which the advancing water has formed and run over to a higher tide line above, then formed again on the way out. The moon has been mid-sky these last days, neither peak north nor south, the tides sometimes two high or low in a day, pulled neither way out nor way up, while the water has been helped ashore by the onshore wind. Further north, towards middle bay the more straighline wall and cliff line of the south gives way to a rhythmic interplay of rising and then falling rhytmic ridges, the whole shoreline breathing here, the high tide line just up and over the peak of each little ridge, where slightly to the north west side of each brief rounded cliff lips appear again similar to the long line further south, where water has run up and over the ridge lip but here has also run along it and carved out a slight wave formation. The watery horizontal waves of the ocean forming, after they crash, the same in the sand. And we see here how all such rock formations are made by such a flowing, by such a snaking, including Kaarta-Kitj Wave Rock further inland.

There is a human being who lays himself down at the shoreline each day. His head lies to the south in the more wall-like form of the shoreline sand, the water held back there from its prevailing direction (a large granite groyne to the south we should probably mention). His head is up this end, all hard form and walls, like the bony borders of the head. He then moves further down as we walk north, towards the middle of the bay as it curves in, finding there a gradual easing and rhythmic breaking of the sand and water of the bay, as little ridges appear, pointing the way to the prevailing wave and wind and tide, each a little replica in miniture of the overall bay outside. Here we find a gradual procession to a kind of ribbing and breathing of the man in the up-and-down, in-and-out, movements of the shoreline sand, little bays within the overall bay, a tiny mirroring. Eventually, moving further north as the middle of the bay begins to curve back out again, we find the place where the often-dominant wind and wave direction rolls up ashore, and there we find no wall, nor rounded ridges of little rhythmic bays, but usually flat open sands with water sliding in on the shoreline walking way. Here the man’s limbs reach out and on, gradually stretching, bones thinning out to nothing, everything.

A small sand-cliff line running the length of much of the bay today; from the southern part anyway. Same man lying down along the shoreline way. Head up the long cliff-line end, where the low, mid-sky moon barely makes it over the sandy clifftop, less waves, until we reach mid bay, where the slightly larger wave, where the shoreline turns, makes it up and over the sandyclifftop, rounding and flattening it, so we have little rhytmic ridges left, where the cliffline would otherwise have stayed; this ribbing section the middle of the man, carrying on until the ribs are flattened and the water moves freely one way and another as the bay curves back around to face the approaching waves. Here his limbs and belly are open to the world—his willing really, following the feeling of ribcage midbay, and the thinking of the hedy clifftop. The old man again there this day, but displaying himslef in slightly different ways—one of an infinite number of ways.