In a gully we found it: hash of fallen trunks

like the ribs of some great beast. But

we were too old for it, too big to squeeze within

and too prissy, afraid of the doings of ants

and unknown others, intricate civilisations

and workings of rot, the dried bark half-way back

to dirt, and some maze, some great working

beneath the surface.
Up on Bald Hill, the grey shrubs grew knee-high,

slanted to the salt wind, flowered sometimes

purple like dusk, ochre like sand,

testament to endless endurance, endurance

without goal, without hope.

By night, if you left the track and sat,

shrub-high, you could simply be

gone. 
The dull-scaled goanna,

shrunken in its hide as if the flesh

had perished since some past

moist plenitude,

moved in stop-motion, cranking

the cogs of its shoulders. We hung the rubbish

out of reach, beat spades on the ground,

while it licked the air like a slow clock.

Did it leave, whale swimming the dust,

for fear of us, or on its own prerogative?
Everything was wrong with me,

the purple welts where the unsought

woman-body erupted, faster than the skin could stretch,

the fat like off-casts of food.

It was wrong with her too and

I made a model of her fat rolls in the sand

for her to find. She tore apart my B-shaped pen,

threw the plastic in the dirt to warp and fade.

In the tent she rolled on me, savage even

when she’d left her body in sleep, pressed my face

in the stinking mildewed cloth, her on top of me

and her bedding on top of us both.
Each day the sun came up in the tent fly.

A sheet of light on the estuary,

flies rising from the trees like steam.

Each day the lighting of the stove,

one flame for each family.