From Rainbow after dusk

All night my headlight dazzles the leaves. And kangaroos too, who climb out of the sleep of farmtown edges, under the same moonlight where bronze Anzacs doze; “at ease between the wars”. That light's a dreamscape where paddocks, restless with mice, frame moonstruck silos practising stillness.

To thunder across the country like a daredevil bikeboy of the '50s: tyre marks of country dust, in low gear shifting skyward up a hill. The tail-light glows. Just. Strung out on those hills, like the many others alive only at nightfall, to span a continent. Or part thereof. Nameless, but placed, the night I rode for Ouyen on no petrol.

***

This is red earth country. It looks empty and open, but is crowded with ghosts. Those figures are hidden away in the folds of it, invisibly here, and there, letting me know I am watched, tracked. At day I Iook up into the blaze of sunlight and know I am not the only one. They go on like I do, and my having been here makes a ghost of me too, a moment in time that will always have been. A moment toward which I have always been making. Spring dusk sweepers on the road to Ouyen.


Inspired by a David Malouf poem