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  • Tributary
  • Caitlin Maling (bio)

I stay on Don Khon not Don Khong    (where backpackers throw full-moon parties and drown in the river)and go out at sunset to bargain with a fisherman to take me out    where the Irrawaddy are said to surface.

I’m never expecting anything    to be beautifuland my legs ache crouched on one of the planks    in the three-plank canoe,        while the man stands uprightscanning the water        —silty and opaque: a used frying pan.

If this were Australia,            I would just dive off,only the Irrawaddy come up in front of the canoe    just where the man had been pointing.

There are only ninety left in the wilds of this river.I didn’t know they sang            until that moment.

I remember pushing myself down in Coburn Sound,    away from the sounds of my family,    into silty water        sinking almost to the point of darkness

closing my eyes and opening    to see a shadow of a thing        a metre away, [End Page 161]

then the rush to the surface to see it emergesmiling        so close I could see teeth.

The beauty was in    how ignoranceis a promise    of a discovery,

I wanted to tell the fishermanhow hating dolphins is one thingmy sister and I have in common

But didn’t.

I saw the dolphin,I felt my leg cramp,I started thinking about dinnerand the couple in the shanty next door,    how when they fucked the whole floor moved

and the sun started to set over the Mekongin an entirely ordinary way.

It wasn’t until I was back in Australiathat I learnt the dolphin song    drives the fish into the nets,and the fisherman pares off the catch    between man and dolphin,and the dolphin wasn’t singing    to me, or for some beauty,        but because it was hungryand thought the man behind me    would feed it.

    He just turned,drove me back up the Mekong. [End Page 162]

Caitlin Maling

Caitlin Maling is a Western Australian poet whose first collection Conversation I’ve Never Had was published in 2015 by Fremantle Press.

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