I’m keeping an eye out for the snake the ranger said suns itself

along the path, but there are only a few dragonflies darting,

shifting from shadow into radiance, and a lizard whose tongue,

blue as a gas flame, jets from its mouth. There’s still enough sun

for the snake to be out. Perhaps it’s lying around the next bend,

but I stop to watch a Brahminy kite ride a slanted wheel of air—
with its white collar and chestnut wings it looks as if it’s wearing

an aviator’s jacket. A lyrebird is mimicking the waning repetitions

of an echo, a voiceprint from the cliffs made when a ranger

or bushwalker tested their shouts’ hard walled returns. I walk

to the creek, to a ruckus of flapping ducks, to more dragonflies

on intricately veined wings tessellating the light. A brush turkey 
scuffs up a pile of rank leaves. Six black cockatoos fly between

the casuarinas and send out far-carrying calls. Thankfully—

still no snake, it must be basking elsewhere, though I can’t

help seeing its prey-monitoring tongue poking endlessly

into the air like a pickle fork, or dangling loosely from its lips

like the free-moving tail of a half-swallowed rodent. Soon 
the path will be redacted by shadow, hopefully any snake will

leave for its ledge or log hollow and wait for dusk to cool its skin,

for rest and digestion to succour it into inertia. Now the lyrebird

is fine-tuning the drawn-out shrieks of a bush stone curlew—

or is that the startled cry of a bushwalker, blood draining from

her face, as a still shadow by her feet suddenly rears and hisses?