Almost Pause/ Pareidolia

Narcotics cannot still the tooth

that nibbles at the soul.

—Emily Dickinson

Labile wonder, no rabbit-like fear, sea hares

filling the tide pools with their magenta ink are

flamenco dancers as much as mermaids were

dugongs. All those sailors mistaking the docile

monogamists for sirens. How often we graze

our hulls on rocks of clear vision. Still, we have

to see it with our own eyes, their turning tricks

their light desires, billowing in the space between

landforms, soft folds shape. Forest cockatoos

have entered the city. Baroque ripples in their

wingtips indicating stress. Married to what

we intuit as signatures, this persistent cleavage

A sickle shaped leaf at the base of one remnant tuart

Slow chanted count of the mopoke above our heads

While in camp fire ash, the roughly laid out matrice

of squares on a turtle’s back speaks of net. Here a man

quadriplegic, has been taught by his mother to make

a sign of the cross with his tongue. Number

the things played out in the mouth. Language hesitates

to enter the concealed strand of vertebrae beneath

a dark lick of scales, uncoiling across blackened remains

of balga, racing as snake into our shared vision. Our

hands extensors and abductors gripping themselves

riven in resistance, the words ‘beyond regeneration’

heard again in a stand of sheoaks. We can follow

the blood red trail of uneaten zamia nuts out

of scalded wetlands. Mining mountains no longer

unmoved, even this verse cannibalizes itself

remembering the feast to come. Like, when I

use the word ‘eternity’, when what I mean to say, is ‘water’.

Amanda Joy