Altar Rock
I: Brand Highway North
As angles travel, haystacks refract hectares,bales become ziggurat temple stones,sandstone drums for columns never assembled.Here speaks the international currency of straw,a coppered steel dialect, whose accent soundsDevonian here, Australian in Essex.
In Dongara, Morton Bay Figs form the arches,tracery and trunks of a half-completed nave,scaffolding removed from all promise and purpose.North of Badgingarra, hills as dark as sodden moorsbeg chapels, a hardy leather pelt stretched tightover the country's bare, sharp bones; the punctureof one post and it will rip and spill white sand,scarecrow in a storm, bleeding straw.
II: Mount Magnet Road East
Further north, the land is prised open, they say,valleys regurgitated. Mountains bleed into sea,flesh hung from trees charred by their own shadowsblack hands held up against the sun. It may all be true,for hear now, in the distance, this prophecy: the night'schandelier, crashing over a black marble table.
So savour these last wheatlands, where slopes carpetedwith golden grain's choral glow still flap and cracklike hot sheets, outcrops burnt back to the blood-red bone,fired limbs of blackened stone. Here the war has beenrefined to contour lines, visitation stories of dearthand deliverance Jeremiah might have believed;here is hope, discrete, unspoken, but lightly inscribedon slopes by slender post and wire, faith in invisible riversstripped down to watermarks etched on tabletsbetween dusty trees.
III: Mullewa
In the deli's dark and sullen sanctuary, touristscongregate, lured by the promise of everlasting flowers,buying sour communion wine, while in shuttered shopsand shrouded rooms in every fibro cube the dry townkeeps watch on the rock at its skirt, where Hawesonce dreamt black and white might kneel to rub rough stoneagainst their cheek, and weep. This lost momentstill stalls the day and haunts the night, this lost chanceto take things further still runs under this skeletonof a town, a stubborn silver trickle, waiting to be found.
Graham Kershaw
Horseback
I like the names, the recitations,the desert moon, the gait of camels,the wild men with their beards and honey,
the women with their well-used names,the olive groves, the stony mountains,the mystic, intermittent rivers.
I'm scared though of its discontents,the sound of thunder minus rain,its liturgies and long divison.
I hear the wisdom in its singing —despite the tumult of the priests,their formulae and incantations.
The latter half has calmer paths,is easier on horseback —milder hills and more oases.
The dialects of both I findstill buzzing in my ears,a kind of tinnitus perhaps.
The older on, it's said, is filledwith what the wind subtracts from stone.Each village, town or city