Selected poems
Headland daydreaming
These things said he ... Our friend Lazarus sleepeth;
but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep. John 11:11
Dawn, and grey gums hang hushed over Abraham's
Bosom, the water ruddy in the creek: This place is new
to my son, who doesn't know that satin bowerbirds
pilfer the brush and has not heard the hardwood bridge
we cross. He's busy tracing each scribble in each gum,
and my hands are full of his hands, faintly heavy —
faintly delicate. A towering deciduous fig
hangs over us; its branches are neural pathways
thin at their tips the way memories thin in time. Heath begins
to flatten along the 'wreck walk' while bloodwoods submerge
beneath the calls of New Holland Honeyeaters
which flicker between combs of coastal banksia and a haze
of scrub she-oaks in brambles. Their greyness disorients,
and we find ourselves guided by the thrum of the ocean.
My boy doesn't speak the language of this land, sand gnaws
at his heels — we stop three times to pour it out, fine as ash.
I know this walk well, its contours and undulations —
recollections of push-bike rides of my youth. The story
of SS Merimbula who heaved herself against the rock ledge
at Whale Point. She survived, but laid herself to the mercy
of the waves and wash of time. Now, tea-tree leaves wound
legs with a salty dew as we emerge from the narrowing
path, our barren Via Dolorosa. Last night, the rock pools emptied
themselves into one another and now the boy is out clutching
at crabs. Gone, are pied oyster catchers, deckhands and travellers.
The last passenger-liner abandoned to the perpetual swallowing
of the tide. The air is seaweed and spray — I pluck periwinkles
from their solitude and throw them into the sunburnt ribs
of her bow. His mother is here too. She's holding a new-born,
milk white like the sands on our feet and cawing back to the black
cockatoos we passed earlier. This time I'll share:
here is where the ashes of their grandfather sleep.
On Visiting Cape St George Lighthouse; or, Standing between you and the rock face
For nothing was simply one thing.
The other Lighthouse was true too.
—Virginia Woolf
The moon holds itself bright and fat
in an August sky,