I
Polluted mud coats the river’s mouth
south stretches of impassable reeds.
Walked up midday, casting until empty;
empty until late; back past midnight.
Hungry for something beyond
distant eyes untiring mind,
searching for static traces
of silver ghosts.
A stick plunged into the viscous shore;
Straight stem bifurcated, forming a why.
What does it divine? The wind elbows,
cold at bay; core warm; face and hands white.
Night. How long has it been? I should go.
This is not a bed of triumph.
Nor a dawn of promised sky.
No: the dark above water is hollow.
A night with pinched cheeks;
a thin oily sheen on being,
stillness as though —
Discarded wounds deposited like silt,
building up, gradually cracking the dam
that contains the void above the mud.
And a breeze that only lifts
when the wind is completey still
pours along the river from that void
bearing a weightless, mute gelatine,
an imperceptible, all-pervasive condensate
of ugly grief and desperate pain.
II
As I was, as I was, in the glowing young arms of the sunny day, in those hours still blessed, before the gelatine had begun to seep up from the mud. Up a crumbling red cliff, clutching weeds, dodging thorns, keeping balance, heavy load, sweating, hot, alive. My phone buzzes: leave me the fuck alone. The coming night grins. Cast, cast again, telling myself it will work. A tap and then tension. Rod slightly bent, reel relaxed — oh look, a small bream. Ok seeya mate. New cliff, new spot, try something else, cast, retrieve, wind wind wind, free free free, this is what I wanted, and I am having it.
Atop the cliff, the farms, and they do not feel right. Migrant workers, mostly Vietnamese, tend to and pick the crops, and sometimes nod as if to say, “who is this idiot?” The owners’ houses sealed with roller shutters. Big satellite dishes. Manicured gardens behind cypress and brick, segregated from the red earth and the lines of dark green kale, broccoli and spinach. And the people who pick them. And the fertilizer runoff — and the mud.
Atop the cliff; down again, between the reeds, lose a lure, no bites. Did I eat lunch? May as well have. I meet the gap between day and night in the wrong place: where the reeds die off, and revegetation has failed, and it is there that the eroded bank becomes a VCA grad show dedicated to casual, local pollution. Concrete rubble with roots of rusting iron; trees with roots dead or dying. Hung in growing number on the water-carved gallery walls, a pleroma of acrylic, nylon and polyethylene tears: veins of abjection that put shame to those who speak it vainly: filthy, torn t-shirt, faded flat soccer ball, sun-bleached longneck, ruined camp chair, ruined Ice Age backpack, twisted, fetid umbrella, long-lost esky lid, mud-filled tyre, half-buried trolley, a tangle of dirty, thick monofilament lin —
A small finger of bare land emerges from the opposite bank, from an impassable reed bed, pointing to the sea. On the tip, a single worn out school chair. Upon it sits a guardian that can only be seen by an over-tired fisher, by peripheral vision in the light of a head torch: this muddy, still psychopomp watches the unmourned and unwept scraps of determinate being as they slowly relinquish form, grieving the death of their purpose, awaiting their microplastic revenge.
Oh my brothers and sisters, witness this reminder you who walk neck bent back and eyes to the uncloudy sky: this is such a small taste of what has been done.
III
I cast again —
— heavy jig,
doesn’t help,
weed on hook,
take it off,
cast again,
more weed,
reel it in,
take it off.
Try a vibe,
doesn’t work,
knew it wouldn’t.
Diving minnow,
doesn’t work,
knew it wouldn’t.
Try some bullshit,
doesn’t work,
fuck you.
My monologue has turned ironic.
Not a promising sign.
So I smile as I dance down the bank
of this distant cousin of Styx
on the Western border of Bunurong land,
whose gods I have not met.
A change in the atmosphere brings seriousness back
There: the Y-shaped stick!
Of course it’s a sign! Not a Y but a V —
Nike! In her four horse’d chariot…
A silvery trail in the current, what does it mean?
Squint at the opposite cliff, a deep hole beneath.
Cast again, mind into the dark.
How far can I walk out before the water enters?
A meter. Two. Water laps up. River bottom pulls.
I sink: the mud wants me. I re-plant my foot,
my stumble my yes: the river smiles.
Perfect cast, full focus on the hook’s point:
Lift-lift, wind, sink. Always certain any moment
My back hurts, I repeat: maybe now, maybe now,
maybe even — no.
Past 2:00am, I’m beyond jouissance et le mort
— still having a go, mind you —
but I know in my heart of hearts, I should go home
to a flat filled with problem after fucking problem.
I cast again.
IV
As I near the end of the bend before the mouth widens and gluts, there is a red glow above the cliff on the distant bank. Fires from the refinery near Geelong cast a strange aura on the clipped horizon: the painted void invites.
Then a wetly jagged noise penetrates the still gelatine into which I had been so absorbed that I cannot remember if the wind lifted or not, because what’s the difference anyway?
The harried sound punctured that appalling and insidious voidal gelatine — it wasn’t loud, but it didn’t need to be.
I knew what it was before I saw.
It should have been asleep,
but its flock had left
and now it was alone.
It propelled itself
cross water’s veneer
wretched and frantic,
toward the sick bank.
Heavy fishing line wrapped
around its muddy white neck
feathers stained with dry-and-fresh blood
wings nylon-bound.
Trailing from the cormorant,
a curse of swivels, hooks
monofilament line
and a large teardrop sinker,
heavy enough to hold bait in place
against tide, wind, current —
— and life.
Pulling the cormorant down slow,
reeling it in over weeks.
How would it feel, this perfect cruelty to a bird?
Picture a steel rod, rusted,
breaking away from concrete rubble
as it punctures your foot and calf.
But you are very far from home,
there is no help
and you know how this ends.
You, too, would thrash against mute denial of sky.
It reached the bank,
and then ran away,
calling out deep and
wet and ragged.
