The girl meets the river. Light ricochets off its surface at right angles and ripples along the opposite bank. Little space stands now between the sun and its horizon. The Long-billed Corellas gather with their complaints and warnings, swoop parallel to the river’s surface, their white bodies replicated in bronze.

She heads northwards, is tracked by the wind, the seeds ratt-ratt-rattling in their awns. Gatyekarr lies in that direction but she will not go that far, not this evening. She leans against a River Red-gum, its roots so exposed it seems to feed on air and with a little encouragement would become waterborne. She has given a lot today and the tree is a solace, as is the river, beings on which she knows she can rely.

Downwind, an old woman approaches. She is the Poem-speaker, one half of her body so compensating for the damaged other half that she has developed a lean. Once, as a child, she met her beloved poet, returned after too long away in the city. Those hands of his were also ruined, from all his years of working the land and wringing words from his pen. And she saw in them the capacity to carry and transmit stories of this place: the poetry of her people. But also a promise.

The Poem-speaker is on her way home. Her house is by an elbow of the river, a satellite dish pinned to the corrugated water tank, gathering the rumours that travel across country, true and untrue and everything in between. The evening is warm and a fine one for a walk, despite old limbs. She has all hers, unlike the River Red-gum that the girl has leant against, a gaping black hole from where a branch broke off now home to a noisy pair of Musk Lorikeets. The Poem-speaker halts in her tracks, her hurt side drooping like melted wax.

She sees the girl and she does not see her. She has entered the poem – his greatest, many say – the one by which the Poem-speaker came to know the world

– Listen! The young girl said. There calls

no voice, no music beats on me;

but it is almost sound: it falls

this evening on the Orange Tree.

The Poem-speaker hears the whirring of a Crested Pigeon as it takes flight. The wind in the setting canopy, will will. The bark is paper now, the kinked ends of the girl’s hair commas in the linear light.

The girl turns to face her, her skin gilded by the last rays, and the Poem-speaker knows she cannot be real. Not a thing of eye and bone, but the incarnation of a wish.

The Poem-speaker sucks her disobedient tongue. A thousand lines written by a dead man and her still living, still walking this land that is her beginning and her end. Oh, the years of listening. So many revelations. So much pain. All the human effort to account for it and find the truest words. She might just manage, despite her damaged body, or because of it.

This she vows as the girl holds up her hand in farewell and vanishes into dusk.