Up and Down a Dry Lake

1.

Here is a lake without water, a bed too often denied a body.

These skied flats don’t forget the water when it’s gone—fidelity

born down low. Belly of the lake: a play of tesselated light,

grass sunburned to a single malt bends before the unfenced

wind, and grins wide as a broadwater. And yet, it’s the passing

clouds I hear laughing at me; too dry out here for tears

at my coming up short, for words that won’t land. A lake

two hundred metres deep with silt, a long accumulation chokes

in the throat like grief, nonetheless a small figure standing

in the middle, I’ll speak for what inheres, lie on the dried mud

and tufted grass, be baptised by dirt and re-membered by earth.

Rain anoints balding hills; the lake falls for the sky’s catchment.

2.

On the western shore of the lake a scarp rises. I climb hard

for the top. Struggling to breathe, I’m standing in a bone-

yard of gums; a forest unfired, heavy with ribbon-bark and big

trees felled in a storm. I sight men on horseback whose habit

is killing. I hear the screams of people given away by the smoke

of their campfires. How many years pass before the difference

between murder and death erodes? A mob of Eastern greys

move off in slow motion; in this dream everything is interior

and burnished by sorrow. There’s no way back now, an almost

perpendicular descent impossible in the fracked light. My hope

remains human; to rest a hand on a weathered post, the remnants

of a fence to follow clear of this thicket. Lee-side of the ridge line

I chance on wheel tracks sketched like a dry watercourse; a spare

gesture. This place of passage: patches of hard-packed earth

give a gritty warmth that draws me close, and I love the broken

ground as a child loves it; awake to who I am, and who I’m not.

Note: How many years pass… from Anne Michaels’ novel Fugitive Pieces, p54.