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Even in the dark
I recognise this stretch of road
through bushland;
blindfold, I'd still know
this country:
surely it remembers me…

Somewhere just ahead
the dense scrub opens out
towards Pine Mountain;
close to the highway
Jim Crow's craggy features
eclipse reefs of stars,
while across the parching grasslands
bald Mount Wheeler rears.

Another mountain,
piled with dreamclouds,
pillowy with moonbeams,
waits to be acknowledged
as my parents did,
shadows on the bulldozed paddocks
grieving where our farmhouse stood.

Anticipated, sensed, the sea
beyond the hills' eroded fence
speaks in subliminated imagery
before we reach the coast -
a slick of moonlight licks the islands,
palm-frond consonants rasp harshly,
sounds that smart like salt
in welts of memory.

I know where I am, and call it home,
though outstretched arms have gone
from orphaned earth we used to farm,
the roof that weathered sun and rain.
Constellations graze the heavens -
as I remember them -
declining to receive me as their own.

 
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15-16 June, 2006