i. 
The first vision: it was prehistoric,

the gargantuan ferns reflected in what he called

a billabong. We didn’t know what it heralded,

wider than the promise of platypus

the arresting half-risen stumps of drowned giants,

when on we gingerly picked through mud

in our ill-prepared shoes

            I had wanted to visit the lake for years

for years I had been alone, on the misty drive to Forrest

had braved the unsealed road only once

and then only halfway, afraid of being a girl                          Where is Yugoslavia?

without reception, and all that                                                   Past the curatorial intent.

forest

            It can dwarf you.

The light hardly reached. The rainbow horizon

had closed in, where we had wound up from the breakers,

the unrelenting open-mouthed dominion of surf

into which we could	
Always be afraid. Awe

that is what lives on this continent, not small things:

the footprint of a megasaur, among whose reeds

            a duck.




ii. 
Echuca: the barges are busy with incantation.

The word spiritual drops from the mouth of a woman

for the first time, into the river.

It sinks, upon this scratchy red-gum churning course

with its load of goods, with memory                                        Where are the bags of flour?

of its load, of goods, when Bush was Frontier.                       Past the curatorial intent.

Spirit is the frontier. I am not Australian.




iii. 
A windowpane of light above the descent of evening

I know there is memory in that, grasped in the outline of trees,

the white peaks of waves in the distance beyond the pier

in echoes I must now explain in words, for poems

stuck to windowpanes, where Christos left a tiny shark

hanging from the hook of his fishery, the globe of its right eye

a dead glass encased in gelatine. Here is the poem,

this self-reflexive patterning. He was ousted by the market

driven past the day’s catch, and we – readers of line-work, augurs

who stopped for those taped-up faded handwritten

notes of ascent	                                                                          Where is it written?

stop now for our reflection. It shows us real life                   Past the curatorial intent.

the strain of offices, coffee, catastrophe in the mouth.

Down by the swing bridge, the estuary cuts, cuts the sand

continually rewriting the moon.




iv. 
“If one no longer has land but has the memory of land

then one can make a map”
All this whiteness makes me cry.

I seek succour in a Vietnamese fabric store,

that conjures a land adjacent to another adjacency              In the dot and the line

and so on, riding a carpet that might take me closer            that say to me, Nothing.

to the places adjacent to my dreaming.

In Magic Dollar I say to the woman, You have everything

东西, that lie between East and West.

Her door is interval, sluice gate, through which my heart

predates concepts, nicely rounded out.

Somewhere مرجان is the name of a girl

mounted on a plinth. I am waiting, like the stolen,

for a handful of earth in my coat.
Notes:

东西 = dōngxī (thing), composed of the Chinese characters for East (东, dōng) and West (西, xī)

 مرجان = Marjon/Marjan (Farsi)

Section iv epigraph is a quote from an unnamed source at the Jewish Museum of Australia, St Kilda