that is, if it weren't desert water, that has not softened
its
stark mountain poundage, nor summoned any arbour,
villa,
folly or hamlet to make its shores less bare:
merely warnings about crocodiles, by whom you can be leather-coffined.
Our guide showed us the green Ord River in its downstream pose
and the gold kapok flower, and the veal-coloured Kimberley rose.
We learned later about diamonds and their blue clay arcana
and we learned of the scrub cattle who found someone's marijuana.
In
Broome, I didn't revisit, as they're now a guidebook draw,
the headstones ofJapanese who once trod the sea floor
sending its clamped crockery skywards out of floury detail
and hung nightly in shark-heaven to still their blood's crippling ale.
Every cemetery's a fleet of keels. We checked out the Zoo
with its high wired cupola, walked the catwalk in full view
ofmany endangered species - and beyond them, more and more
dying distinctive towns, looking up in hopes of rescue.
Land of pearl and plain, where just one man now goes for baroque
and is mostly liked for it; of seeping pink gorges and smoke,
where whites run black shops since, as my aunt found at Bunyah,
deny credit to your own poor and your world will shun you,
where great films await making, perhaps not for Southern television
(most Oz comedy dismays us, we agreed, with its terrible derision),
where bush balladry has set rock hard, with decrepitations,
as a means to silence poetry, and a finger stuck up at denigrations,
since most modern writing sounds like a war against love.
We were grateful for our week, and experiences that brought
bottom lip to top teeth, in that f that betokens thought.
The true sign of division, in that land of the boab tree,
lies
perhaps between those who must produce and those who must be.
But the nacre of cloud had formed over the earth again, above,
and
the rust and dents were gone that say the Kimberleys are
a splendid door ripped off the Gondwanaland car.
