Game, Set, Match – by Maria Takolander and David McCooey
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
1. Running track
What will they make of this exercise
in geometry? You know, those survivalists,
those brute athletes from the future,
when they stumble from what’s left of the jungle
into this polyurethane field of past greats.
Will they succumb to white-line fever?
Will they start circling like planets
around the imaginary jumpers and hammerers,
according to the crystalline spheres of space?
Will they appreciate how we barred flora
(not least the bedlam of fauna)
from this hallowed place?
Will they understand why we prayed by counting—
one two three, one two three?
Legend will have it that, at the finish line, we vanished.
But we left behind all this
bitumen and concrete and rubber and paint
to keep our lives from ever truly passing.
2. Basketball court
We use acrylic paint fortified with graded silica sand to create this sporting effect of sky nailed to ground. Of course, blue can be manufactured in other ways. The oceans absorb long waves of sunshine, at least where unencumbered by slicks of oil. Cyanobacterial toxins bloom blue, feeding off agricultural fertiliser to manufacture their unholy stink. Blue flame signals that gas is burning safely. The glaciers are melting, but a blue moon is reliable; it happens on every thirteenth, though scientists insist without paranormal influence. Blue eyes are more sensitive to sun—proof the bleached stare of Arctic dogs is not shock but mutation. Blue iguanas make good pets, though if they bite leave teeth in your flesh. Avoid blue pit vipers, which have haemorrhagic venom. Other snakes turn blue when pregnant. As midwives have long advised, don’t hold your breath. Blue eggs at Easter symbolise eternal rebirth, though shells are first blown empty of life. In heaven, blue supergiants are a million times brighter than our sun, but live and die young. Their light is history—not that the Greeks, despite the Aegean, could name that hue. It was the Egyptians who farmed for indigo. Heatstroke lends skin a blue tinge. Tattoos turn blue as the lymph nodes do. Dumortierite is an aluminium boro-silicate mineral, Al7BO3(SiO4)3O3, a crystal with the power to unlock your third eye chakra. Which is to say, if you have faith, blue can enhance out-of-body perception. It will show you the future.
3. Soccer Goal
Net Not for ambushing pademelons or moths.
Net Not for jumbling crabs, dugongs, eels, octopus.
Net Not for snagging corpses bobbing down the brown tributary.
Net Not for veiling faces from fiancés or flies.
Net Not for saving aerialists at horseplay.
Net Not for mitigating falls—of men or spanners—from an oil rig.
Net Not for tangling jets on carrier ships.
Net Not for snaring submarines or sixgill sharks.
Net Not for collecting squalls of leaves, masks, polystyrene, plastic bags.
Net Not for billowing, like silence, in the wind.
Net Not for bearing the weight of the sleeping.
Net Not for catching those nightmares that sport with the dreaming.
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Images: Maria Takolander & David McCooey
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