The Word Museum Where Samuel is the curator, has been for a very long time. First I see a persistent, single-minded mollusc with a rock for company it’s a piddock and it has a periwinkle for neighbourhood. it’s wet and cold today perfect for word-viewing, and word-making it’s hard for Samuel to keep up with it all. Suddenly, peering I find him he’s a hope-monger singing songs he’s learned from magpies on the way out I saw pilliwinks Just near a bottle-cell Samuel stopped me After he had finished scratching 'Just remember it’s what we do with words That makes them. You see that love is the central exhibit.' Barramundi (with gratitude to and admiration of David Gulpilil and Rolf de Heer) I want to eat a piece of Charlie’s fish Speared with a 'dangerous weapon' and coal-charred In his country. Charlie talked to the fish, 'What a good fish'. Covenant Better than the white man’s supermarket stuff. Breach of convenant. He digs early graves for us. The story and the love we refuse to know Is written in the Territory of his face’s landlines, In the deep of the pith of his silence, In the aetiology of the ineffable. The wonder in the wordlessness, strong, true meaning. Cross-legged before the altar of his fire His eyes are talking with the stars, A firmament of hope Spitty’s Ruins They were out-of-bounds, Beyond the boundary of the daily litany and liturgy, Not within the kingdom’s demesne, and we all knew What that meant. It was spiffing to know that there was A mystery, some place where something spooky happened. You could get there all right, the fences were down, And you just had to get the measure of nesting magpies. What was there sang, old stones, brambles, fallen walls And dry thistles: you had to be careful for Spitty ate small boys, threw the bones in the lagoon, To be washed up in a tide or two on the shore, With the muck and mulch of clotted seaweed. The whiskers of the nostrils snickered at the stench of it all. I do not know whether anyone’s written Spitty’s history, It doesn’t matter much. It was good that he was there. Storytellers and gossips needed something To climb out of the lexicon of