Indistinguishably grey morn,
Winter empty of enmity
For his own kind, a blind shadow,
A kind of quiet falling after storms:
He had dragged his still saltblind hulk,
Delivered from the jaws of one
To another, more spiteful god,
Guanyin's antithesis: and so
Firstfooting on these washy sands,
Marked himself on a reversed scroll.

A golden carp swarming in a million litre aquarium:
Like others washed ashore at Robe,
He was first of the illegals,
A minnow slipping through the nets.
On this coastline of countless wrecks
Enduring desultory bursts of sunshowers
And the annoyed flocks of gang-gangs,
He arrived at Boyle's swamp, then hid,
Only to find himself talking
To pumas and telepathic thylacines.

If he looked down into puddles
He would see the Moon riding high,
A dirty Apollo, dull crow,
Or more likely a wounded face
Grinning into a half mirror:
He had seen such a sign before,
Strange how she wore two earrings, each
Green as leaf, night-glittering:
Nothing here spoke to him, but for
Pelicans flopping across black waters.

A grey swamptree stood silently.
A lone wanderer gone missing
Between unknown here and Hopetoun,
Fire and wind his memorial:
Nameless shapes swooping from the north,
Sorrows from all directions.
Civilization could be
Lamplight at the end of this track,
Or acrid smell of burning hay,
Babble of unknowable tongues.

Sandhills, not mountains: dust, not gold,
Though in each league his feet easing,
Passing from shore towards sunrise,
New country, unexpected sights
Of familiar birds - Osprey?
For others he had no plain words.
Something mocked his unspoken fears,
Shape slipping past the campfire's edge,
Shuffle-crackle of dry twigs,
Muttering to itself in broken dreams.

Li Bo would have admired this sight,
A pregnancy riding above,
Shadows sailing, storm petered out:
It would speak of his yearning
A thousand leagues from home.
He was no scholar, no poet,
His tight belly ached too much.
Burning words stammered on his lips,
Tongue thickened, cormorants listened:
This poem should become famous, sung.

Heaven, then, is very like this,
Sins are remitted, winds smiling
As they tease dunes and estuary,
The waters all turned to hard slate.
He saw the pelicans hunched over
Along this stretch of brackish water,
Cold and indifferent to him,
Knowing it was the year's turning
And that there are no mountains.

The soul is a running battle,
More observed with care than beauty:
Rhyme too an inadequate style,
And that dogtrot is so easy,
Avoiding all so real heartaches,
A sort of Extreme Unction
For poetry's fundamentalists:
The Border Watch photographer
Caught only his elusive footsteps.

Created: April 14, 2001r.
Last Updated: April 14, 2001r.