She won’t smile the smile of incineration.
They won’t sing the song of disintegration.
Together sprung, noise music, see-through mirrors.
Locusts spin in flurries. They have begun to fly.
The bobtail out the back is fat. Crow feathers
are strewn over acres. Rings forming
in the bright sky. Their descent is known.
The ladder is propped up against the rainwater
tank—I have to ascend to clear the leaves
from the grille, but she would only have me descend:
precarious, I perch. My ears are giving me hell.
Two days ago we drove down to Arcadia.
Into Arcadia along forestry roads, rutted
by logging trucks filling the quota. The protest
camp with its wire and papier-mâché
quokka. Mainland quokkas ranging the jarrah forest.
Four hundred meter corridor—promised—barely
two hundred. The sacred stream, arterial, filled
and forded. In and out of dieback like humour.
Fifty-year regrowth cradling the undergrowth.
Marri trees less useful to Gunns—horror
company—left as Habitat. Marked H in rings.
Occult emblems glowing out of brown-greens.
Ensconced in the forest, fallacy is sucked
into machinery, police wagons. About the campfire
dreadlocked souls discuss lock-on methods. Concrete
and car bodies and piping and their own impact
on the forest. I am here now, the soul glow still
intense but tremulous. Camp dogs snap at flies—
that’s memory, and taking the message out
is what’s supposed to happen. To be arrested
is to arrest attention? To believe in something
is better than believing in nothing? Tree by tree.
She won’t smile the smile of incineration.
They won’t sing the song of disintegration.
Together sprung, noise music, see-through mirrors.