I don’t walk alone very often anymore
A set of single footprints tracking across
Dirt like soot
Mashing gum leaves the color of a pastel rainbow
Dusty pink, wattle and lime
My thoughts carry me like a conversation
Over the burning rise to the spinifex
Her shimmering mass before us
Glimmering and sliding
Clouds like clotted cream just above the brim of my straw hat
I read to take my mind off the silence
The absence of questions
My voice unpracticed and rasping when I said “don’t worry about it”
To the wet lady like an emperor penguin and her leaping sanded dog
Children lost and alone on trains
And I’m walking further from mine
She greets me across the crisped plates of sand
Holding my calves and licking the inside of my knees
I walk the length of the bay where my grandmother rests
The still-high sun forming a delicate weave of white light across the tops of the water
I sing softly to myself stopping to pinch between my thumb and forefinger a bright red crab, also sleeping
And I think of the joy the boy would get from such a sight
I greet her
Ridiculously
As if she is imprisoned in bronze and ninety degree angles
When she is everywhere
And nowhere
The motes of dust and the salt in the waves
What a fucking terrifying life this is
As we all
Slowly
Disappear
I embark on a circumnavigation
Astounded at what this body
Can do
As I clasp cliff faces
Lurch across divides
Still singing inching myself up the sandstone
Climbing the stomach of a fallen beast
Never looking down
I trace the outline of a fossilized shell
Her concertina edges
Note the crabs (still scuttling)
And two prawns stranded in a hollowed out bowl
Filled with sea water
Obscuring themselves behind the mustard seaweed like pearls, like bubbles
This lunar landscape
Pocked and sculpted
By lamenting winds
I plunge into salt and weed
And pick my feet up across the homeward
Expanse
Buoyed and blooming,
Overwhelmed
Irises digging into the last of this day’s light
As I whisper goodbye
Sweetly Unhappy People 