Where the river crept out
from behind the dunes, brown as tea,
we turned off the road
in my uncle’s station wagon
and roller-coastered around a paddock
that slumped into the sea,
a furious spot where trees grew sideways
slicked back over the hill like a spiv’s hair.
We stopped. One tree, pressed so long to the ground,
had died, a quiet shift from trunk to log
without the showy necessity of falling.
And there, as we heaved it over,
a smashed carnival of Christmas beetles
heaped up and glittering like the remnants
of a tail light swept into the gutter.
We gathered them in handfuls
and when we left, they came with us,
caught in our jumpers like Egyptian jewels.
Days later, at a bend in the river,
we stopped to eat by the slow, dark water,
a lace of sheep droppings bobbing in the shallows.
My uncle, who had been at the Melbourne Olympics,
swam across in his underpants and sat on a ledge,
a white streak against a high rock wall of ferns and cutting grass
reached only by swimmers.
Emptied of reflections, the river seemed a ravine,
his return, the methodical flight
of a strange and forgotten bird.
As darkness came,
hunched blind among the smooth stones,
we came across a rabbit in the last stages of myxomatosis,
its eyes marbled with blood, and behind it
something like a deflated balloon trailing in the gravel.
Heading home in the wagon,
I wondered how long the rabbit had been there,
how long it would have to wait
for the shadows of the far bank to reach it
across that expanse of stones.
Somewhere behind me,
the dried out beetles slid across the bare floor
at every turn in the road.
