En route, we were shown the creamy shitwood tree,
named long ago by stockmen, as it would be,
and near it, two such ringers, men with the remote eyes
of those who meet with scant gentleness, who live on supplies,
whose little screw horses perform superbly or get shot -
the sort who took Australia, and founded the good life we've got.
And then we reached the Bungles, a massif of roofless caves
made of rock-brittle, like brick skin after a lifetime's shaves.
Chasms munched underfoot. Long palm trees from primeval
Australia, where we live, emplumed niches near the sky
as iflowered in there, by their rotors. In a retrieval
of hobohood that night, I spread my sleeping bag atop dry
grass whose merciless needled spirochaetes of seed
still infest my clothes. I, sex slave to a weed!
On the massifs other side, striped towers of profiteroles
hid chasms with similar stained flumes and limestone swallow-holes.
Over one of these quivered water-shine from a pool long void.
Gaudi palisades spoke of wet-seasons by which a near-destroyed
otherworld, that long ago was this world, is dissolving.
As we left, tourist dust was a pillar by day, revolving,
and we heard of the crazed hunter, here on human-safari some years ago
who shot several, and died riddled. Rangers told campers that although
guns were outlawed in the park, they were okay for self-protection
and an arsenal emerged: revolvers, assault rifles, a black-powder gun ...
Next day on the Dam road, unaccountable miles from water,
a snake-bird showed its prongs to two eagles planning its slaughter.
We netted it, in a jacket. Next monster to devour it was our bus.
It lay in cloth-dark, intensely alive, without fuss,
as we visited the Durack homestead on the ridge where that'd found
Ararat when their green castle wasn't blown away, but drowned.
In one room leaned a real spear, not tourist junk, but straitly thin,
tense as if in slung flight, like the legend-shaft Windinbin.
There too hung a kite-framed headdress, coloured in concentric twine:
that's true Kimberley, and can't be bought, unless you are McAlpine.
At the dam, we reimmersed the darter bird, who instantly sounded
(with no notion of cross-species help, it seemed unastounded)
and then we regarded the nine-times-Sydney-Harbour expanse
where nine tipsy Joe Lynches might embrace deep mischance
and ferry the wrecked moonlight down a dimjnishing spoor
of bubbles between nine Empires' chained men-o '-war-
