The armoured bream glint

and scatter. We bunt the hull

against a submerged pylon. The anchor

chatters its chain against the gunwale and

vanishes. We can feel in the swing of the dinghy

how the anchor kites in dark silt thin

almost as the water itself.
This is how the river catches,

hauling what it can from underfed creeks,

widening to pools where the tiger snake,

quick as history, swims in patches

of water warmed to a green

opacity. How many spirits

are caught in the phosphate

run-off, tugged, almost weightless,

against underwater rocks, torn at times,

only to come back together.
Rivers are secretive. They do something

to time. But only rarely do they catch fire –

the day smoking down on us, the cold cinder

crumble of a paperbark under hand, the hot sheet

of the surface at sunset, the hook in the eye

of a whiting. When the anchor is raised,

it’s a dead weight, laden flukes trailing dark

mud as it emerges. We have caught

almost nothing. But we hear,

in the beginnings of night

how, on the river, even

a voice is ash,

at last hushed.