14/04

walking down a narrow dirt track

– a disused ranger’s road to the reservoir

– the air feels cool as milk,

leaves carved from shadow

lie long, as though flattened by car tyres,

evening quiet in that evening register.

as my eyes edge into the canopy

above the track, where crowns from

either side compenetrate, forming one ceiling,

beads of liquid caught by my brow

could be the sap of the eucalypts.

I know the gate ahead will be padlocked shut,

blooming with rust. breath

this night comes with a pinch

and a mist. spirit beings

created the skyworld, where emu-footed men

and dog-footed women dwelt

undying, the earthworld of surfaces

where inchoate, huddled foetal mists

waited for those underneath to awake and burst through

and bring with them the sun and the moon,

blades to divide and define the formless,

stories to tell, laws to impart, songs to sing

until they saw fit to resume their sleep

or withdraw into rock, red termite mounds, water,

all things, charged thenceforth with secrets

only to be spoken into the rightful ear.

at the gate, I give up on such thoughts

for the scaling.

I was never a climber – my belly

presses hard on the tousled parapet of wires

unknotted in an attempt to cheat passage,

my legs, at one point, flail behind me

such that I have prostrated myself, half in, half out,

and suddenly I see a human megaphone,

sewn around the ear to an open mouth, two bodies forming

a pistol, bobbing down a busy Melbourne street –

anything whispered

entering the world as scream, and silence

reigning in vacuo between broadcasts.