Pilbara, W.A.

Islanded
geologically encased — like Wilpena Pound formation
ensuing difference
** a beetle, geologically encased, a gorge, enbeetled
gorge conforming, within the mountains — outside rim rather than issuing out, insect

myall spinning, skidding on saltbush carpet slipped underneath
prostration of saltbush sweeps

trees    the wind had covered their trunks with fine white silks

“underwater” quality of desert birdsong

mesas, islanded by gorges

black cockatoos — message sticks
winged — caduceus

starry sky perfectly evinced in the leaves

metal desert     pinched iron ridges

somewhere to disappear and appear from
basal, hardest desert

lazy parabolas, wire strata

time’s little wind persists
log cabin smile
buckled strata

time very graphic here
the earth's layers
like rings of a tree
like leaves of a book
laid down and laid down
like a graph      like a diagram
very basic you can plot/calculate your significance
time represented in the same slabs
year after year     perfunctory
evenly deposited     factual
and lying more or less as it was laid down as sediment at 180 degrees to the circumference of the earth
beginning to buckle under its own weight
but bored through      buckling like iron with heat and pressure

but grubbed through big water
making all time present
steady, metered, not a touch of fancy
basal, primary oppositions

oppositions — greens of gum leaves / red rock     heartwood redgum     washed quartz    red quartzite     white bloom trunk     born with mauve
under and overtones
snake dreams

Sugar gums — Wilmington

a ridge tree — rocky prominences and skyline

others — yellow gum          redgum — some bulbous
peppermint-like gum — narrow leaves
lower — black box like tree
calls of woodswallows

hills — sand sucked in lake runnels

free sugar

purple-brown stain amongst other gums
the ridge is their fastness
saying, “we are prime here”
something in their form — ornate — ornate occupation
like a mob of prophets gesticulating from the mountain
upward satellites sent out
want to quest — telegraph the skies
how the sky works through them

They bore me my first casemoths, elephant beetles (leaf beetles), musk lorikeets

Coming here
realise the wildness suggested/encased in the fallen branches
borne on a fallen branch
wedge tail — insidious, that slow rotation
maybe ascending on the gyre of the sugar gums’ aspirations