Letting go in the late and tawny summer
It's good to follow the river a day or so
toward its sources in the Tinderry Mountains,
quitting, maybe, a house and time
distrait with phones and television news,
(the elsewhere present which keeps us up to date).
Come, we have driven to the town's edge
and parked the car beside the dusty blackberries
where the track fissures into deep rain-gulches.
We're feeling buoyant, renewed already, as
we start across flaxen paddocks, the hay
in places matted like a swimmer's hair,
highlighted by dark assegais of mullein
which point at a sky where wisps of slender cloud
unravel themselves like dancers.
And as we go,
walking easily with sticks cut from a poplar,
the ducks and coots break cover, flapping away
like women shaking out west dusters.
The snarl of a chainsaw falls to the pitch
of a bee passing through hills; high above,
a jet is a ghost-white termite crawling on pure blue.
High on our right are the horse-paddocks
and hobby farms of Wickerslack Lane,
while on our left is the river's splushing obbligato,
here shallowing to a tremolo over stones,
here diving under fronds to run
in clandestine stipplings of the light
passing with low syllables
through olive and honey adjacencies
and willow roots in their cappillaried
crimson imbroglios, each a colour x-ray
of the brain's blood system. Or here,
where the stream stills to a velvety glide
in modifying veils of light and foliage,
alluring, leading our gaze as it reveals
more or less of itself in voluptuous loops
between the hills.
No little thing,
no smallest facet must escape us, we think.
But there is time. Yes we will have time.
Though now, inevitably, the path becomes notional,
a slender fox-track marked at intervals
by neat fox-droppings on auspicious stones,
or a mere displacement of grasses where
a blacksnake passed. At times it disappears
in embranglements of tea-tree, charred and leafless
after the '85 fires, and we stumble,
grappling the stingy, tensile branches
as though they were the wingbones of pterodactyls
in some graveyard from Cretaceous times,
emerging,
not in Narnia, not in Middle-earth,
but in a setting tranquil as the act of observation.
We descend to the river now. The lagoon's crescent
is waiting for us with its idle hours.
In the slight breeze that reaches us here
the water scales itself with exquisite intricacy
like the parts of a samurai's armour,
while on the higher slopes now
a burling south easterly from off the Tinderries
rinses itself through the stringybarks and shall
by late afternoon bring fine gauzes of rain,
lasting a day, no more.
We stay here, growing in watchfulness;
it is good. A seed blows downstream
still attached to its parachute.
The hips on a nearby wild rose are reddening as though
slowly suffusing with blood;
within a month or two their skins will be edible.
In time, which now we begin to believe we have,
we will own the names of all we see
casually, as one owns a gesture.
As sunlight whitens into cloudlight
the baste willows form dark vestibules
along the opposite shore. The rocks cool
beneath their fine green maps of lichen.
We shall not think of the return journey.