Simon Kindt
How to know that there is a thing called holy and it is small and close and sleepingYou will still feel her fingers in your palm;
the knuckled memory of her heart will hum and echo slow as you make plans to build a shrine to her in the spaces where she pressed her cheek against your neck, stitched her fingers to your chest and with an ocean calling through the window, ebbed herself to sleep. Now, the house at rest, her breathing, steady as a pulse, comes humming through the wall and carried on a vein of air now threading down the hall to where you find yourself waiting for the earth to turn beneath you. In a minute, a single breath will stall inside her throat, will gather itself, swelling as a wave to break and exhale itself as song and it will take a feat of will to not sing back and wake her. You’ll tell yourself to sit instead and sift through your agnostic language for some vague approximation of the note now spinning prayer wheels in your throat. Fold
We round an oxbow slowly,
the prow holding a line drawn for it by currents we don't yet see. She leans over the edge, brushes fingers through water, lifts her hand and watches pearls form on the ends of fingers, sees them grow, then quiver, then fall back to the source and for a moment there is only the river, the prow pushing through it, the physics of time and this. Our centres folding over in the slow mechanics of how a bend in a river's flow will pinch at the bud, how water will wear through landscape, will grind upstream rocks to powder pressed slow to the bend and excise its own appendix, casting off its own stray, leaving the discarded waters to still their sinking bones, the fish to wonder where time went to, and pressing always on, to a dark and waiting sea. Flinders #3
From the mesa the town below
was just another map of itself, peeled back skin pinned by eucalypts and leaning fence posts, the river dry a spine dissected, edges fraying into ghosts of Elysian Fields. From the east the thunderheads rolled in heavy and crackling, magnesium flares sparking, lighting up the sky’s belly and drums, drums and drums. We were golden jokes, strange shapes in stranger places, mermaids high and dry. You, proof of a lower case god, a driftwood cathedral bell tower rung, singing for the slick and honey wet. Me, opening my copper throat with flints, to drink the sky from red and flashing gills. We sat, sails flapping and jaws reaching as the sky broke open overhead, the storm clouds, waves following each other in, throats popping and gushing, the rain, molasses thick and wine dark, falling over itself to get to us before we drowned in air. Bay of Fires
The bay appeared first as a limb reaching inland
then blew out into brilliant expanse, the ocean lit in blue. We watched it turn silver, then to stone and then to blue again as the sky made up its mind. You, my blue heart, plucked questions from the sand and answers from moss that grew across the knuckled stones on the shore and stained the rock pools red and you stood atop it all, declaring your tiny self monarch of all things. Your kingdom, a shining arc of water named for fire, a granite foreshore bedded down with colonies of mussels and a beach dotted with stilled black bundles of feathers and disassembling skeletons. The glass clear water, still carrying in the bodies of fallen migratory birds following the same ancient clockwork as we do when turning silver, or in attempt to learn the myths of the grand ‘return to place’, find something resembling comfort, or if not at least our own ends in landscape, falling heavy as prayers, awed by the distance we have come to be offered up, to throw ourselves in rapture at a beach as stunning-white as the pale and final horse. 
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Up, Up, UpYou find yourself complaining that your back
-bent by nothing but the dead weight of your head- is too old and sore to bend when she lifts her tiny hands to you and asks you to lift her high. And there you are- struck dumb and wondering if your father remembers the last time he lifted you, whether he knew that this time (this begged for one more time) would be the last. And you think of how one day when he is old and frail and thin with ghosts, you might yet bend to carry him, from a hospital bed perhaps, into the fading light, or down into the earth. And you think of all the lasts that punctuate this thing that is your life as she lifts her hands again and your aching back bends and you raise her to the light. We, such stuff as dreams are madeit’s true sometimes,
a day will end like this: the river swelling as the tide comes in, the sun slouching down below the ridgeline, light unstitching the horizon. the shadow of a hunting hawk spiralling a thread of air above the headland, waves singing quiet through the water, golden light washing your hands. your daughter carrying a bucket full of shells she plucked from the low tide line, she’ll spill like jewels across your palm, and you, for once with no desire to weight these things with any meaning but their own, for once with nothing in your head but thank you. In which the Derwent River turns out to be hauntedWhen looking for traces of yourself in landscape,
go to where the water comes in diesel slick and meets the city, linger at the dock under a grey sky, watch the morning cruise boats loading their cargoes of champagne, oysters and the middle class, see the pewter clouds above, rolling off the shoulder of Mt Wellington, shrugged off like some trivial thought, and the child sunk somewhere high in the boughs of your family tree will come to mind, a ghost conjured by your own, as a bundle of still grief wrapped in linen, cast in a shroud weighted with shot, and buried at sea, imagine a mother’s loss as a suddenly softened belly, the promise of a new life distant yet in lands still warred for, and of another child born from the same womb on the same voyage who would live, blood still running a loose thread in your veins, wonder what songs were sung as the bundle was cast to water, how quickly a body sinks, how eulogies are just long iterations of one question and how quickly a story can bleed out white, decide then to remember more clearly and start writing a poem, under light breaking at last across the Derwent, the gulls above wheeling and knifing finally east, the tour boats backing off the dock, the slow shapes in the water moving out at last. Monument to Hubris #3 Spiky Bridge
You may have come through hail and sleet
(praise be to climate control), brandishing your maps, guided by digital gestures, marvelling at landscape and the remnants of territory, having struck the correct pose at Spiky Bridge and imagined convict bones ground into the mortar but when the wind hit you side on at the crossing and the wheel kicked in your hands conspiring with the slick road to throw the hired van in a just sufficient slide to remind you not to lose yourself in metaphor, that moment… is the closest you will get to finding yourself, a wreck of twitching meat and metal, lowing at the bottom of the gully while Major de Gillern barked and whipped the convict boys above and built a road across your bones. What we fell into
1.
the thing moving through us was called tide our hands slick with silt mud sucking us down deep skin snagging on the broken ribs of mangroves drowning joyful in each other’s humming bellies 2. when the tide drops you’ll see us in the sand hips locked femurs fused a perfect tangle of bones plucked clean by holy crabs clacking red claws at the sky 3. you can’t tourniquet a river if you’re smart- you don’t even try |