It is a Saturday morning following a thousand others.
The ibis, Death in a ruffled white robe,
swipes his black beak-scythe at crumbs
whose time has come,
the jagged red stains under his wings
dried blood from the beginning of time.
Golden orbs, milling strategists, position themselves
in the spaces between wet spring-green branches,
echoing the hangman
with their strong silver ropes.
And the bush turkey – well, you know
what it’s doing already –
the sunburned Rosicrucian’s bristly head
questing for its unknown, holy designs
among disturbed, lively dirt.
Its yellow scarf and trim black suit
easy targets in our unfashionable age.
Eastern water dragons puff up zeppelin cheeks,
tear at one another’s throats, breathing
heavily through frills, turning
bodies mirroring one another
in a slow Japanese dance.
Moorhens stalk the mangroves,
dots of bright reflective red
in the glistening ultraviolet morning.
Stone curlews pose like Narcissi,
long-legged avian divas the prey
of aposematic, impressible tourists
with flat black cameras.
A solemn wallaby watches the road
from the edge of tragic forest,
mannequin-still, in frozen indecision
between escape and assault.
A koala waits above in shade,
picking leaves from a tired eucalyptus
as a Roman emperor would grapes
from an aged slave’s raised hands.
And come night, come the unintelligible
sepulchral gibbering fear of a suburban night,
fruit bats with flexing wings,
grand demeanours, squeaking,
circle about Musgrave Park:
black-caped, domino-masked bravos
destined to end up in a farmer’s wire trap.
Powerful owls preside
over plebeian rabble,
subtle and long-awaited;
and guilty, slender geckos
flee from their imperious gaze.
And, itself the great water
twisting round the earth,
the Brown Snake:
resting atop its Rainbow cousin,
anticipating the approach of
the electric snake in the sky above.
The brown, material snake,
“filled with ritual muds,
devouring and religious.”
verso folio 