And why not go, just go?
As if excuse were needed
to unravel our lives, to travel
back, say in a Simca or '64 Holden,
the creeks flickering again,
Northangera, Cabbage Tree,
Jeremadra, the unmarked turn-offs
a freemasonry of recognitions
known casually, as we make
pale dust in the airy forests-
this is two decades before
the bisque and carob villas
will take them away-as we
make such speed among tall
verticals, exams, sixth form
receding in a green shift, how they
become so inconsiderable now
our lives are at such breakthrough,
in such emergence on this,
say, a morning after fires,
smoke, thinned to tissue
among further leaves, a tree
glimmering its crimson geology
where, in the night, it took
the fire too inwardly;
now, breakout into pasture, the last
bleached fibre houses, here
a bus turned sleep out, chocked
on bricks in a backyard, gone,
as we shed elaborations for
a track now bumpy with furrows,
to arrive among swamp-oaks
in a clearing of bottles, fireplaces,
and immediately clamber, ankle-deep,
up the dune's landward face
to recoil at this, this Other,
this flaring immensity, this uproar,
this blue of fabulous daring,
fabulous discretion, making,
dissolving its hades in
an enfolding moment, while
south and north the air
is furry with spume-light, blown
sand; and it is on each
occasion, the same astonishment
as though to have found the world
somehow unfallen. Here we'll not
stay so much as bide in a time
more intent, more lost than holiday,
living off toast, tinned fish,
flagons of muscat, our eyes
runny with campfire smoke,
at evening snatching pipis
from the tideline, watching
the silhouettes of spiders
in orderly, if ruffled, flight
from the tide wood logs we burn,
watching the flagons roseate
tilt as someone, dreamily,
is saying, what if… what if…
And under all, that hush then crash,
the sea's white noise scrambling
what we thought we knew of time.
A couple, maybe, slip off
to lose their virginities or not
as the case might be, in single
sleeping bags, such sweat,
such spillage, so many elbows
in that straitjacket darkness
under the immenser darkness
in the sleep and wake and doze
of so many eras, the pin-drill
of mosquitoes, the brief shower
in the small hours, the stars
innumerable as the grains
of sand in our hair, our clothes,
and the sun, at last, inflamed, lidded
as an alcoholic's eye.
the acetylene morning takes us
out along Mullimburra Point
where two plank bridges span
the high gorges, and it is those
still virgin, one notes, who are
most eager to wobble in telltale
bravado above the writhing blue-green
scales of the dragon, the slow-rise
of its white detonations. But the cabals
are wry, are soluble her, for all
are living the images that burn
into nostalgia, how the campfire turns
white sand to a matt purple, how
a big slow wave will take
such full possession of a body,
to discard it in a white soda glare,
how its rush will remain behind
the eyelids at the edge of sleep.
And in the mid-afternoon, under
shade of she-oaks or tri-trees,
when our novels and talk have become
simply irrelevant, it sill seem
that this loss of programme is one
of the options, one of the sanctuaries
our lives could take, the fawn
sickle of Bingie curving away
to Tuross Heads, Dromedary Mountain
hazed, delicate as a graph line
of gain and loss, that merely
by our presence the land sales
will be averted, the four-wheel drives,
those glossy beetles methodically
consuming terrain, will find
a different future, not this,
where we sustain ourselves
an opportunity and the vast
blue-brilliant prospect eastward
beyond the white dunes of Meringo.