Brain drip

On the 13th of July, 1987, the main street of Alice Springs flooded. The water flowed high, up to the steps of the local pub. 

Thorny fingers of the Rose
Clutch at tilted rotting timbers.
Wilted flowers perching pose
For attention there they linger.

Yet no jaunting love admires 
Nor any bird is heard to sing -
The full maturity of Autumn 
Has effaced all hues of Spring.

Once vivaciously abloom, alas,
Now melancholy stays.
Yearning eyes will wander, lost
In the Garden of Dismay. 
 

The Love Chair

The woodworker walks the stand of camphor laurel.  She knows
the trees' passion: their leaves as familiar as her hands; their 
growth as tranquil as the evolution of her love.

She dreams green's rubric: trees one-and-a-half women 
high; the air showered with wheatgrass-green leaves; a 
branch as thick as her forearm on the ground.

Mystery guides her hands.  Her fingers circle the axe's 
solid handle & the blade arcs through the air.  The axe's 
bit, its sharp edge, reveals the white wood.

She had good days and bad days, and from the moment she opened her eyes that morning she knew it was going to be a struggle. She was tired, as always, but there was something deeper, a heavy feeling in her stomach, a whisper of some indescribable sense that she recognised as the cloud returning. Her vision was narrow, and no matter how slow and deep she inhaled, she couldn’t seem to get enough air.

You show up in Parnawarratji and try to arrange the single loop of sealed road, the vacant red dirt lots and the dotted housing with massive metal cages on the front, into a ‘community’ in your mind. It isn’t what you were expecting, but then, you didn’t know what to expect. Certainly not so much sky, arcing over the horizon, the line blurred by a hazy fringe of spinifex grass.