Driving back through

             Gamilaraay Country,

                            Wiradjuri Country,

old lands, lands we now call

             gold country, coal country,

                            we trace our way along

a chain of little towns: Gulgong, Mudgee, Lithgow.
Mona’s been reading the studies—

near-death-experiences, brain scans

of the unexpectedly, newly dead:

the kind of gamma-wave activity

known to operate in dreams, memory, flashbacks.

Are you dying? I ask her,

as the highway unspools before us.

No, not yet, she says, but I think about

my funeral playlist more than I should.

The body keeps you alive, she says, cell by tiny cell.

I don’t understand the science.

As dawn peaches the horizon, I ask her:

When the time comes,

what will spool past on your showreel?

Well, the light, of course, she says.

Isn’t that what we’ll recall most vividly?

             A kiss

                            by a brown river,

                            blossom-light falling on everything.

And pain, she says, the comrade of love—

a snapped kite string,

             a lost pearl earring, or mother, or mate.

Regrets, too: an absence of grace in the face

of kindness—they’ll swear love

is the most important thing, the fools, she says,

and after a pause: I could have been kinder.

And not to mention awe!

Wasn’t that the great beauty, the poetry, of it—

wonder at the world and its workings?

I never got to see the aurora, I tell her.

You’ll see it yet, she says.

Tell me, again, I say, about those barracuda?

And Mona tells me about the dive

             in the beryl sea that day,

no different to many others,

how time and light shifted on their gimbal;

how she was encircled by a tornado of long

silver fish, a thousand strong,

their undershot jaws, their stripes,

the power in their flanks, glinting like foil,

the underwater background crackle replaced

by blue-and-silver bells,

and other sounds, so low

they can only be felt

as a current in the blood—like a note

from the 64-foot stop on the Town Hall Grand Organ—

the realisation that we are all made

of one thing—

                            and almost forgetting

to breathe. When her air ran out

they had to drag her up by the hair,

her mask half-full of tears.