Back then, roadtrips and hiking trails

all led to sacred rock: Cathedrals sandstone,

Blueies granite, Moonarie quartzite,

a dolerite middle finger smashed

by the wind and waves in Fortescue Bay,

my hands freezing to the rope,

as I watched your headlamp crawling

like an uncertain firefly

eighty metres up the Tiger Wall.
But when I heard you’d married

it was silt not rock I thought of,

silt in a sunlit river,

that shallow, shaded river

we might have descended together,

might have followed all the way,

but that we kayaked there that day

with the man whose wife you are.
I lost my glasses when I rolled.

The two of you were gone

around the bend and did not see.

I waded my kayak ashore through reeds

under the shade of peppercorn trees.

The mud clutched as I waded

back and forth across that river,

peering like a prospector

for metal’s gleam through clouds

of silt my wading stirred.

I cursed myself and the pair of you,

as shade eclipsed the amber stream.

And because I was frustrated

I kept thinking of how I’d waded

last night in the clutching silt of you.
Gave it up as daylight tired.

Hauled the kayak from the reeds,

paddled in a crimson blur

that swirled towards the edge of day,

and miles to fall yet with that river

whose name is clouded now.

The Ovens? Or the Goulburn,

or the Acheron.