Festival Poems 5 & 6: Murrumbidgee Morning, Dead Man's Gully

I awake to naked women

holding their brailed bodies

as they wade to the depth of their waists

in the Murrumbidgee –

and to the current running

leaves like logs on a theme park

flume ride, and to three dead

rhinoceros beetles cultish

in their grouping by my swag –

and gum trees that look so little

now that it is daylight, less of a

gnarled predilection for animism

or sorcery, but fuller with crows –

I awake to the longish hair

of two men I don’t know –

boyfriends from interstate

who shake my cold hand firmly –

their presence has a slighter effect

on me than the wind, or the stones

beneath my mattress, or the press

of oversized convoys on the highway –

the pleasantries we share –

one offers me an old pizza slice –

serve only to illumine a truth

that I have spent this whole trip

trying in vain to deny –

the company I keep,

the intimacy I conduct my athlete’s heart towards,

the smiles I flash, flash like torchlight

are viewed always from beyond my body

in a place where judgments are unfairly severe –

where Anders Villani is an avatar

for I don’t know who.

…..........................................................................................................................................................

at sunset, Dead Man’s Gully –

over which runs Wordsworth Bridge –

seems from afar to be the last

bastion of the final onslaught

of Zarathustra’s Great Star –

its brushy dunes and dead creek bed

suffused with the lulling hues

of an old lady’s garden,

its distant ‘V’ cradling an orb

that will be bloodiest in the moments

anticipating its quiet

deference to another hemisphere,

another gully, another Wordsworth bridge –

now the skyscraping windmill

and quietude – crow song subsumed

into this cluttered silence – reign –

I watch as the rusted rungs

toil with the first human weight upon them

for who knows who long – some of the rungs

are missing – how tiny a man is made

against that wheel of fanned steel,

the gargantuan stock water tanks it powers,

the wire fence around the cattle yards,

the endless A6, where the horizon freezes

each set of headlights for half an hour,

and the final fuchsia vestiges

of sun in the low-lying screen

of stratus to the south,

and the hurtful beauty of the haloes

on the inside of eyelids –

the fact of these motionless overtones

being shown up for myth by every blade

of grass and cane, sleeping bird’s neck –

when Phil reaches the top of the windmill

my bowels have loosened,

my eyes have forfeited their focus,

my forehead is leaking

but even if it destroys me, I will disclaim

every bodily exhortation

to stay on the Landcruiser roof

until the word night can be written in good faith.