Kate Vinen is a writer and director whose most recent short film, ‘Rebecca’, is due for completion in 2007. She is also a singer/songwriter and poet. Her poem ‘The Last Swim of Summer’ was short listed for the 2006 Wet Ink Poetry Prize. Her biggest inspirations are wild places and wild men.

The Search Party

My mouth has been this dry before,
White lipped and deathly dry,
But from a different kind of walking
Where your body was the path
And your heart the destination.
If there was a way back
I would lose it to the land;
The crumbs of love
Are hiding under canopies
That never let the sunlight in.
Few words were exchanged
But so much was spoken;
One is a language to unlearn
That places the future in settings
Amongst alpine grasses
And flannel flowers.
Everything is hidden or exposed,
Nothing just is
And still they search for me;
Bush has been tracked
Riverbeds, dragged
For the body that never surfaces.
There is no one to blame now that
Mr. Sin is dead;
But she swears, sin never dies.
The sights he and I saw
Blur together
And the roads disappear.
I looked down from the peak
Of the mountain
To find more mountains
Below, and understood
My loss is everyone’s loss,
And on Waterfall Way
The granite outcrop
Hid our dealings from the day.
The feeling, I remember
Was all-encompassing
Between a rock and a hard place.
There is your blood.
There is my blood.
There is our blood together.

The Last Swim of Summer

Our first swim was the last swim of summer.
You said I needed boys that
Smelt like the sea;
Now that they are gone
And you are right
Memories lurk down by the wooden boats.
Things I didn’t know about;
I hate not knowing everything.
It is a reminder that the world exists without me,
That I am not a part of everything.
If only I had known then
You can only romanticise something when it’s gone,
Like some kind of consolation prize for your loss.
I will shut my eyes, open my legs
And view the world as I see it.
I find myself wishing there was only one place
I had ever known you
So I could destroy it.
There are too many places that have part of me.
We drove back the following night and you said
We had won
And I knew by you saying it that we hadn’t.