Moving On
- Moving On
after "Daring to choreograph another otherness" from Password by Nyein Way
After the poetry reading,we park, gut the picnic basket, hungrilyspill over each other, grass seeds in your hair,dirt under my nails. My phone chirps. Our son:Cum home now! The afternoon sighs.
Still unbuttoned, we slipinto the Ford, sun anointing the windscreen,our skins rolling. Eucalypt leavesglitter the sign for clapping, their silent applausemocks our cabin cocoon.
Grass limes the roadside, paddocks, hillsfecund after recent rain. Horses bend appetites,penned by crooked fences. The road breathes in,genuflects and wraps its tongue aroundthe bush towards home.
If I take a picture of our picnic place,will I miss the moment? Can I trust my memoryto this time and space? My own history-makinglike wood-smoke in the distance, the roadcurving like a question around us,
the sky bleached blue by storm's bruised promisemoving on. Is this cloud dance of pen and pagea picture dissolving in my mind? A recording of a wishor a fact? Perhaps the knot that tightens within is love, beingright here, now, then gone, without fear. [End Page 21]
Tru S. Dowling is a Bendigo poet, performer, emcee, freelance editor, workshop presenter, and competition judge. She teaches for the Professional Writing & Editing courses at Bendigo Kangan Institute and Victoria University. Her work has been awarded and read widely and is published in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Dowling has appeared at various writers' festivals and exhibited her work alongside artists and musicians. Publications include a chapbook, Memoirs of a Consenting Victim (Mark Time Books, 2011), and a verse novel, Butcher, Baker, His-story Maker (Birdfish Books, 2020).
