Desert Canyon, Desert Gorge

Desert Canyon, Desert Gorge

1.

The wedges of tight slopes
make barbaric window sills
out north and west across
the eremophilia and sitting
rocks, the mulga and spinifex
in a look into Ormiston Pound
where you find a single pink
bloom of Sturt's desert rose
against Namatjira blue ranges..


2.

You tongue-lip your way through
dry red walls of dry rock teeth
of the dry mouth of wild ranges like
a fool walking into the Jurassic;
with teeth regrowing up from below
in rocks like rail-shunted trains,
as in the eternally-pointed jaws
of long-watching land-crocodiles.


3.

Wild horses go a brumby-run
across thin-bladed plains before
the spinifex-needled hills that
necklace out towards Mount Sonder
and the Bedford-van mulga-spikes
a tyre in successful photographic
pursuit across ochre-bared pans.


4.

So rare a thing is standing water,
that treasure, water open to the sky,
that to find fish in a pool at all,
out on Larapinta drive, or Namatjira;
was it Simpson's Gap or Standley Chasm?
you are not surprised that they're dead;
little fish, speckled fish, not sardines
but fish with real fins so you wonder if
and how they ever could get any bigger.


5.

One lad creams the green algae
slime in stagnant side rockpools
south of the cliffside big-pool
at the Ellery Creek Bighole and
you call him out for any cuts
he might infect, while the older
fellas are already climbing walls
ready to jump from the cliffs
into water yet untested for depth
like candidates for Darwin awards
keen to erase a genetic imperative,
but finally the lads all swim as you
do and make the other side like
William Dampier arriving among flies.



1995 (and after), The West MacDonnell Ranges,