Shelf Camp, Mount Anne

He tosses you a silver hip flask:

            Drambuie warms your cockles.

The slew of Milky Way inches overhead —

            static cracklings in a vaulted otherness

as seas plumb down, down.

            Sharp-edged stars quiver.

A sailor’s eye (his hand like a sextant), charts

            celestial objects and their pinch-pull currents.

You are miniscule and light.




~

Wear and tear made an absence of you last year

among mountains, plateaux, and saddles,

 ~




Copper Cove

Your shirt is a spinnaker come loose,

            your hat blows up like a pulled lip.

You kneel to small wonders:

            a crescent shell, purple-shaded,

fading to egg yolk — a week-old corky,

            and here an ossified tree limb with a crook —

a bent and scabrous knee,

            and there — baby sea spurges.




~

forests and button grass plains, lakes and coasts.

~




Summit, Mount Geryon South

Perched on a dolerite column,

            fine-grained dark grey,

scuff-marked with lichen,

            legs dangling and stubble-jawed,

you behold

            a rookery run wild.




~

Your memories’ leavings of these places 

~




Lake Elysia

Afternoon light tightens:

            a piece of glass held to the sun

kindles Mount Geryron’s flanks.

            Breeze agitates the negative:

spires and hung-bellied clouds tremble,

            crack of blue (a ruffled sea),

gnarled pencil pines and crinkle-cut-leafed

            Nothofagus gunnii —

lake’s edge woodblock prints.




~

you love, buffet you, drawing open 

~




Archers Knob

You clomp across the bridge with its wire mesh,

            tapping a ball pein hammer on a sheet of tin.

Grendel backwater lips between the treads.

            Spindly melaleucas lean and loiter:

old men getting under the feet of old women.

            Their flaky paperbark canoes drift and spin.

Obscured by the paperbark forest, ducks, herons,

            bitterns and grebes, each a musical note.

In coastal wattle and amongst leaf litter,

            birds flit and dart and sing.

A wattlebird warbles a gargle and cough.

            Three yellow-tipped black cockatoos

sharp-beak seed-laden banksia cones,

            alight and criss-cross each other’s flight paths —

flock into the loose wholeness of a jazz combo.

            All along the trail the hopeful auditions of frogs

are the waterdrop sounds of flicking

            a finger at your hollowed cheek.




~




the shining fastening of Aeolus’ oxhide bag.









 Phrase adapted from Grundsten C (2019) Trek! The Best Trekking in the World, Duncan Baird, p170 ↩
  Phrase adapted from ‘Choirwood’, Beveridge J (2024) Tintinnabulum, Giromondo, p76 ↩