Blood Heat. Katherine NT, Monday, 7 May 2007 When I first go swimming here, in Katherine, Top End town, Northern Territory, In the chlorinated pool that’s as blue as a shallow tropic sea The girl working there says “ooh it’s cold! It gave me goosebumps.” So here I am sliding in just the same. When did I get to be an old woman? My knees won’t let me leap in any more I slide in nice and cautious Find my way down the silky smooth subterranean tile stairs It’s blood heat. Divine. The clear, soft water that cushions me so gently is blood heat. When I finish my luxurious, slowly breaststroking along, 20 laps, The tamarind trees have become dark blobs against a technicolour sky. The sound effects provided are the deafening, mad and joyful shrieks Of the jewel green parakeets; thousands of screaming jewels Making their way home to their tree dormitories for the night The tropic sky is slashed with orange and red, and bands of lemon green. I swim through hot, moist air While the end of wet season cumulus clouds Roil like a time lapse film across the horizon bumped with stunted trees Everything is going somewhere. I go home to my boring, stuffy, redbrick flat. And as I drive along, I see that along the edge of every byway Move dark, shadowy people Their legs and arms as thin and wiry as pipecleaners They weave and sway like grass in the wind, the old men and women Maybe going to their long grass beds on the river bank Unlike me, they are at home in this blood heat air Their red blood has soaked this ochre red ground This town is built on the top of their ancient culture and being. Now, dressed in bright coloured, flowery ragged skirts and shirts They sit in circles talking, shouting and singing, waving their arms Like tossing flower beds on all the road verges and parks. A strange place, this. “Jesus loves Nachos” painted on the rusty old rail bridge Amazing, beautiful waterfalls and gorges of creamy yellow stone Wild floods and rebellious, cheerful school kids. Preying mantises. I take pictures of it all, to email home To possibly interested daughters and friends. Now the Dry has really started. It’s almost, but not quite cold at night. I go camping out along Florina road, enfolded in the generosity of new friends. Music. Food. Friendly talk. The people gossip about the jolly pack of dogs As if they’re family members. I watch the passionate, intent faces of women playing Irish jigs In light and shadow, they evoke a tragic, joyful and turbulent past Of people right here who made this place their own, for good or ill, With passion and guns. “The only mistake we made” says one young visitor From a not so far away desert cattle station “Was to stop shooting them” I am dumbfounded. The positive, striking banjo notes thread their tapestry of sound Across the evocative, sweet sadness, the breathing voice of the harmonium. I camp that night in a mosquito dome, An insubstantial, gauzy barrier Against anything that might creep or crawl in the night. But it is no barricade against the moon. The moon inches across the glowing indigo sky. Above me, the spiderweb tracery of delicate branches Clutches a spangle of stars. The dewy leaves scattered across the dark green, velvet lawn Glitter in the moonlight like shards of glass. Punctuated by wakefulness, My dreams are like a string of pearls along a skein of silver light. As the moon slowly drags its silver cloak across my face, I wake again and again, to see its brightness edging across the sky. Who needs sleep, when all night the eye of the moon Brilliantly illuminates my dreams? You can sleep anytime. A faint, warm wind shakes the seedy grassheads, A lemony perfume curls from the acacia blooms. The dogs start up and bellow At a kangaroo crashing through crackly undergrowth And in between the dreams, Somewhere across the dewy paddock, in the whispering dark Comes the silver, melancholy, looping thread of sound The stone curlew’s cry As it stalks the boundaries of its territory With its mad saucer eye and knobbly knees Collecting lost souls in its dilly bag woven of starlight. The moon, and the curlew’s mysterious voice Drift towards the western edge of sleep. On the eastern horizon, a faint line of lemon yellow Marks the imminent leaping up of the ferocious sun The moon still floats in the paling sky And the birds take their turns to shout out the coming of the day Black-paper crow, meditative dove, its call so evocative of the North; Butcher bird reminding me of home with its liquid call, A willy wagtail chattering about everyone’s business, And the poignant call of the black cockatoo Trails across a sky of powder blue. I get up to read the messages in the dust of the track. A lizard story, its tail marking a definitive line. Wallaby messages, the vigorous, scuffling marks of paws and tail. Bird scrabbles. Ant highways. And again the air creeps towards blood heat As the savage bars of yellow light Strike like swords across the red earth of the track And over in the western sky, The pale moon floats within a faint penumbra of bushfire smoke. Blood heat. Mad colour. Wild, passionate, untamed beauty. And always, running beneath it, the substratum of tragedy, Of one people who killed another off, lusting for the possession of this land When it can’t belong to anyone, existing independent, frosted with moonlight, A reality savagely painted with hot bars of golden light, Free, escaping out of our grasp no matter how we clutch at it As we pass, our lives as insubstantial as the music and the moonlight That last night, threaded their way through my dreams.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 08:13:48 +0000