Critical State

Poephila cincta cincta

By the pool, their fingernail-sized gullets undulate briskly

as if they are guilty celebrities scoffing a midnight treat,

their black cravats panting with excitement. They can’t

stay in this kitchen heat for long; fluent in the language

of dehydration, a fast tipple or else they’re dumbstruck.

Their image burned into extinction’s cyclopean retina,

as if this fragile flock gazed into the sun directly, or they

were a picnic of ants fried by a bully’s magnifying glass.

The dam water is a current running through their bodies;

it sets off the electricity of their flight, as one they scatter

to the air, like a handful of wedding rice. Thie fall might

weight as much; in the billionaire’s thoughts he’s ripped

out the earth’s coal-black throat; the box trees cut open

like rich sediment. Their habitat halved like a seed cake.

Menura alberti

(i)

He whistled to her & like an inquisitive dog

the bowl of her head angled, a satellite dish

to receive the new music. She was muttering

away in some mimic’s foreign language when

he stumbled upon her; a woodland Pokémon

that evolved the power of water & then slaked

some deep desire in him. The brown, rusted

stovepipe of her tail feathers swung back &

forth, as each great scratch of her garden fork

claws ripped the humus open like rotten cloth.

As he fell, he noticed the bathtub-sized granite

boulders were covered in grey lichen squares,

cool & treacherous as damp flannels on a tiled

floor. Momentum snared, he heard her scream.

(ii)

A Trojan War had passed since he last saw one.

Oracle elusive, it had tracked him like a prophecy

or some shadowy ninja as he hiked at Lamington.

Then it had melted into the forest floor like a fat

witchetty grub, a curled white question mark of

memory he could only find again if he dug deeply.

He picked himself up, mud stigmata slashed across

his palms as he retook the track, his partner shaking

her head at the plunge of birdmen. Or that his cry

had become a lyrebird’s sound effect. Recorded for

posterity like he was the endangered animal, a loss of

pride’s habitat. Their black ship of extinction hauled

up on nature’s beachhead, time caulking their voices’

hull; faint echoes of crackling bushfire and corroboree.

For Judith Wright

Gravity is rolling her particles into a child’s spitball.

Like a student chewing paper in the classroom’s dark,

there is something unlawful about our decline & fall.

In her honour, eucalypts shed their clothes, drop bark.

She has already touched the universe’s filigreed edge.

The red shift galaxies shine singularly as flame trees

in a distant quarry; their blooms are a well-kept hedge

that borders our knowledge, doubt swarms like bees.

She had long been a part of it; her hand-me-down cells

she returned to the sun’s up-market store. A dying star’s

decaying gift signalled the blow of her heart’s iron bell;

as her last breath vanished like the atmosphere on Mars.

She is monumental now; as though there was a Marathon

mound of ancient Greek heroes piled up inside her head.

She was the flint of eco-consciousness that was fiery born,

when she struck at the builders who cleared out the dead.

Still, the earth sucks in its beltline & gyrates its middle age

spread. Forests recede like hairlines thinning out, as the hand

of progress combs through them. All that’s left is hollow rage,

as small groups of creatures turn & make their final stand.

Judith. Her poems are etched on the trunks of scribbly gum.

Insect mouths chew through the grain of her poetic field.

As they kill, borers translate her words into a universal tongue,

& hollow trunks of eucalyptus drum; never yield, never yield.