Three Poems

Three Poems

North of Mount Cameron West

It's true that I know less about this
than I want to say. There is a rumpled beach,
a man moving quietly through middle age.
You are walking with your head up
in spite of wind that flings open your coat
and people watching from the hill.

Behind you the Indian Ocean
comes and goes from Africa,
delivering kelp and cuttlebones.
It arches and flattens
like hands over a keyboard.

You've gathered gull feathers,
arranged them in a fist
as if you had a use for them.

When I follow you to the hinterland
in search of a lagoon,
I notice how you notice things—
a leaf-curling spider's web strung in the boobialla,
a mat of creeping succulents in the foredunes.
When you kneel to these small worlds
as you did as a child, I see
the misnomer universe.

While we walk you are telling me
how people here were hunted over cliffs,
force-fed Christ and wrong-skinned children.
There was that spineless skeleton
with broken thighs
uncovered when sand moved away.

The names here chafe and drag like chains:
Victory Hill, Cape Grim, Suicide Bay.
We put them behind us
as best we can, letting rain and sea
begin to work us loose.

It's true that I have understood so little
but I know this: we must retrace our steps
or lose the way
and I see how, under cloud,
Mount Cameron shifts like a restless sleeper
checking the horizon for sails.

Buoyancy

There are creatures that have it—the whirligig beetle
for one, paddling in tight rings on the surface, its club feet

dimpling the meniscus—that hang there, spellbound
between elements. Its life's work a matter of ecstatic circles,

it looks up and down at once, its eyes horizon-split.
You taught me this as we waited for platypus. None came,

but for us in those days everything was in the waiting.
Lake Chisolm drew darkness down to its sheened brown ellipse

and from the fallen myrtle piled haphazard at its edge,
shadow pushed sharp light up the straight trunks

of the bordering trees, up to the foliage, to the crown,
as the dark came down, welcome as forgetting.

And the quiet. In that hushed amphitheatre
the toadlets tuning their instruments

and the grebe young piping after the older pair,
as they leaned into the widening past of their wakes

like a scissor through silk, only deepened the stillness.
Our breathing was audible; a lone fly was loud.

A wallaby thumped once, waiting to come down for a drink.
Then the silence of moss, the forest spongy with yielding,

while bull ants worked their songless chain gang
along the log where we sat suspended over water,

the beetles too, marooned, held by the skin of the lake
in a planetary gyre, a half-eye on one life and a half on the other.

Horsetails

Backed into the hillside in the corner paddock,
Fred's pony, winter-rumped with a coat the depth of a hand,
looks up from his cropping and stares with that steady
sharp-eared leaning look of hungry ponies. Where the land falls
to a glassy pond, three ducks hunker down, greased against the cold
and head-hidden, motionless as toys in an abandoned bath.
Climbing has silenced us, and breathless and aching
we raise our heads to the brow of the first hill.
Horsetails are forming, flicks of cloud against a blank dusk sky,
dark remnants of a clash of fronts you know will bring a storm.

When we wake two nights later to wild weather,
you stroke my belly and play your palms and fingertips
on my breasts and talk in your loved low and breaking voice,
while thin branches whip the window pane
and smatterings of rain are thrown at the iron roof.

By late morning when we wake again the wind is elsewhere
or simply gone, and in the bare winterlight your upper lip
has...