Thirlmere Lakes: Winter and Spring

Winter

An unmarked trail, a slight sandy furrow

through open woodland. This country is gently

inclined to the first in a necklace of freshwater lakes.

Barked angophoras house the sky, banksia,

leggy gee-bungs and the generous mouths of wombat

burrows, tell a cultured under-storey.

Heavy cloud steals the sun, and the sudden cold

mocks my thin cotton shirt. I’m startled,

beside the track is a nest of downy-black feathers

stirring, as of a bird had up and flown its warm bed.

Blood not long acquainted with fresh air, splashed

thickly down broken stems of bracken. No other

signs succumb to my percipience, but what’s left

here implicates the panther-like feral cat

I sighted earlier on the road, its swagger as I swerved

hard to hit it. The feathers, like a pile of clothes

hastily cast off, tremble in the baffled atmosphere.

Even though I’d rather be walking, to be making warmth

in my limbs, I’m stayed, remembering other swift

disappearances—bodies once held, and black holes

in the fabric of the land— all those tender, still

constellated remains...

Spring

The fire-trail is a series of switchbacks, descends

from a plateau of dry sclerophyll forest.

I’m half- running—half-sliding to keep the weight

of my body over my feet, and don’t stop till I reach

a lake; a tear-drop like aperture. Brimming it defies

winter’s drought, is fed by ducted waters; an aquifer

below. Small fry crowd the shallows, hover about

patches of leaf litter on a bright quartzite bottom.

Tiny, but already conscious of white-bellied sea eagles

who fish from the trees that darken the lake’s rim

like eye-shadow. Trees that read the mind of water,

then grow curvaceous, following the most unreasoned

twists and turns—elders who are past pleasing any

person, or fashion. Small birds leap and stop dead,

cantilevered at quivering right-angles mid-way up

a sheer flank; plump bodies a crash test for the skinniest

of high-tensile legs. The lake’s edge is reed spears,

parted here by a beach. I slit a hollow stem and flatten

it to a pale strap, which gives off a warm scent—

sea-grass matting on the floor of my teenage bedroom—

fibrous lines and silken touch work their unmediated

weaving action; marry memory, muscle and sheath.

Published in UCVC’s 2017 Prize Anthology signs, and soon to be published in What’s Left ASM.