The train North rocks. Like a drunk.

      We fold into a dining car booth, our tenth anniversary hanging

      above us, grim as a wilting mistletoe. He pulls 
      from the archives that reverent, watery gaze – a by-product of utmost sentimentality.

      I open my lips to a screwdriver and calcify in the wet cement of the near-past:

      our discarded child, a loaded jack-in-a-box in the centre of my chest.
      He leans in, takes my hand. A-G-A-P-E, he spells passionately. Goes wild with fire

                  metaphors: rekindle, fan flames, tend sparks.

      I prefer the horticultural ones, I say. Cultivate, prune, nurture, water, grow. He appears
      not to have heard me. Love is a verb, he says, stressing this last word. He is quoting

      Bell Hooks, or is it Massive Attack? I concur, gardening or arson, we must try.

      For the rest of the afternoon, I smile but cannot shake the image of a singing foetus. 
      The colossal red rock stretches, yawns, and plummets like a graph with tragic findings.

      We gawk into its smooth buttocks. The guide calls me sister.

      Don’t you feel like we’re part of a problem? my husband asks when we’re alone.
      Speak for yourself.

      As tourists, though.

      I nod, recall that joke about the wombat – eats, roots, and leaves is its punchline.

                  At night, we watch the stars loosen: incalculable cubes of glass lolling about on a 
      cosmic hammock. In the lurching lounge, he bumps his elbow on the table’s rim.

      Bumps it, moans, curses. My eyes remain fixed on the sliding landscape, flattening itself

      into a coarse, red palm. Wind stirs the dunes, but there are no oak trees 
      to trouble. If I were ______, you would have soothed me.

      Are you a child? Are you?

            A penetrating silence.

      As the day unfolds, we stringently exchange words, but do not talk. Our cabin
      smells of coffee and feet. Shelved on the top bunk, I read of war in the paper.

      The article is sad and deeply biased. I ask why we allocate compassion so selectively?

      It’s like that drooling dog, he answers from underneath me. Chekhov’s.
      Pavlov’s.

      Once we determine who the Cowboys are and who the Indians are, we have our stimuli.

                  I suck air between my teeth.

      Tell me I’m wrong.
      On the way to Adelaide, it rains. The confused, cracked-heel earth clenches

      and softens. Taking care of oneself – our private euphemism for masturbation. I assume

                  this is what nature is enacting, until I see the wonder across his face and realise
                  it is an act of mercy.