Town of bougainvillea, of turmeric dust, of tin
geometric solids that people run tourist shops in,
of pastels and lattice, of ghosts with dented heads
and porthole eyes, whose boats recline on beds
of tidal concentrate, to resurrect, if ever, when aquamarine
re-engorges the mangroves, and raw Romance has been,
when a recent Shire President was Mr. Kimberley Male
and pearls shower upward through shops like inverse hail.
In that town restrained from lovingly demolishing its past
I saw fewer brown faces than when I'd been there last,
Malay Afghans, Chinese Aborigines, or Philippine Celts,
and Euro Australians, with hind paws stuck in their belts
and a burnless tail dressed as two moleskin legs from there down
must have hopped to Derby for the races, or moved out of town,
but the sun off Cable Beach, entering the ocean's hold
ran its broad cable hot with incoming traffic of gold.
Deeper levels were anchored with many-fathomed ropes
knotted with old murder and world-be-my-oyster hopes;
jerseyed grandsons of the neck-chained took marks, or kicked a goal
while a great painter of theirs sat in jail for jumping parole
and it was dry months till some mouthless cave-coloured one
would don cloudy low-pressure dress and dance a cyclone -
Why tell this in verse? For travelling, your reasons can be
the prosiest prose. As a tourist, though, you come for the poetry.
Slot-car racing in a groove deep-cut by a grader through dust
I asked my mate
"This low bush we're in, this pubicforest:
is it all picture, or all detail?" "You could die in it, resolving that."
Our bus seemed to climb
all
day, the land was so flat.
The Kimberley was once mooted as a National Home for the Jews,
in the late Thirties. Even then, they felt constrained to refuse.
In Palestine were their Dreamings, in Vilna and Krakow their roots.
Midmorning, then, we came to an Aboriginal kibbutz,
with real children, barefoot ones. The square we weren't to stray from
contained a mud-brick church we hated to come away from,
since inside were Mosaic scale-armour and celestial wicket gates,
the table of God, His kitchen, His dresser of plates
each a lucent pearl shell; above that, His concrete city, rose-pearled
with
all
the arch-shells' mundane sides facing out of the world
and their lustre cupped our way. And over
all,
full span,
hung the Reader among characters: God, sacrificed to man.
