A Kimberley Journey

made with phillip england, august 2005

inspired by ruth kilpatrick – "that book needs a journey"

prologue

On birthday's eve
My thoughtful friends
Gave gift of gloves,
Green sewn, and book
All rawly-wrought
From precious pulp

Yes! Would that I
The wide-flung Word
Might rightly weld
And yield return
Unto its Lord

fencepost

fools!
you thought
that you
could fence
this in?

dead tree in wind

archer

poised behind
a split bright shield
of lily leaf
I saw you shoot
and hit

high tensile

long before
man made such stuff
as high strength steel
and kevlar cloth
the spiders spun
such webs
above this pool

bell view

any other mountain

it could have been the alps
that smooth pale slab
and fractured blocks
we climbed until
at last a cheval
perched us both
upon the summit

the same river

a hard deep wound
in fissured rock
in red and black and green
a long clear pool
in open land
fringed by tall white gums

three queens

three queens came
to land from wind
decreeing
we shall build
our cities here

temple

under the place
where people painted
the bowerbird
had built
his own grass temple
paved with stones

hand tools

it fell where
he had dropped it
not far from
the workshop where
the stone chips
lay in piles
for a hundred
maybe thousand years
and I bent down
and held it
with a hand
not so much changed

pandanus

guarding the way
to fresh water
with a maze
of detachable spines

boab bees

nestling under
the wrinkled arm
of an ancient
silver massif
a murmuring swarm

shoot

tree against sky

cities of wasps

dry islands of
clustered hexagons
hanging beneath
the ochre cliffs

lifeboat

obliviously secure
in their perfect
crystal pool
the water seeps
now just enough
to keep it
one third full

palm

a spindle on
the chasms lip
against a strip
of blue

palm arches

four sisters

pebble in sand - line in sand

smooth muscle

the bowels of earth
are not of flesh
but stone
and not by
stricture smoothed
but inner force
of boulder
and of flood

bungles

as a child
a mountain range
of clay might make
and cry delighted
"feel it!"

pulse

somewhere between
the aching silence
of those bare
red hills
and the wall of sound
the drummer built in Broome
the same heart beat

meeting

in mulga vastness
two cars pass
a wave
the whole of man
between two hands