For the strangled impulse there is no redemption
— Patrick Kavanagh
There was a waterfall, mapped in the founding
survey, two hundred years ago and lost,
eroded—something—so no later crew,
miner, or bushwalker has seen a thing.
miner, or bushwalker has seen a thing. The river
it should have ruptured is still there, unspooling
where it ought to, out of the Burnt Hills down through timber
east of the Perth Road, chattering with chipped
fossils, flint-shards sparked by eels, then pooling
in a colonnade of cedars where the lost
falls should be exploding, still.
Went looking for you, what I thought was you.
A skirling of wind in the skymost branches
and peering round me for the radiant detonation,
vapours pulsing up from the sinkpool, I seem
to see the chalk-white shock of it — a cliffslide
through the cedars’ warped, ashen balusters —
almost feeling the mist of this vision
condensed to a strange dew’s
trickle down my face.
Wind dwindles then, dies, and that ghost-foam
flickers, the cataract-roar ebbs to the dodder
of a stone-bald, greying, oblivious river,
and I go.
Where have you got to? Gone to. Two hundred years,
the path healed over, the cedars deadfallen
or deeper in the sky, the mapmakers
deeper in the ground.
deeper in the ground. There is a waterfall, they lied,
afraid that love dries to a dotted line
on the map, that the river in time
slips underground, and This to prove
we were loved. This whim
against what drifts to dark.
We know, of course, it will not be found.