Swimming fixations

It is hard not to be preoccupied with the swimming pools. As the plane descends into Perth at daybreak, passing over corrugated roofs and tracts of gris clair bushland, the pools flash like shards of a mirror smashed in an overgrown lawn. Here the dawn is taken into physical custody. Step out in that thin hour to see stars drowning in the gardens - every waterbody brims with sky. Once an American astronaut called Perth "The City of Lights" but seen from this intermediate altitude, a different elemental mean dominates the landscape. What Rachel Carson described as that "dark, subsurface sea, rising under hills, sinking under valleys." As if the pools were in fact all connected to some great undergirding reservoir, a fluid scaffolding revealing itself. Here and there a pupil-less eye stares out of the topography, bright and blind, fringed with scrub. The plane banks. A seam of sunlight blinks across their surfaces.