GASCOYNE: TWO ROADS
Burkett Road: Red
Burkett Road west to the Minilya-Exmouth Road through staves of dunes prickled with
crotchets of spinifex and through scrub of stunted hakea
whose woody fruit clung tight as cold testicles and through gatherings
of river red gums, white-barked gums, that proclaimed,
muscled from the skirts of the floodways and the dry creek crossings:
‘have to go,’ you said, and I took my foot from the octane,
let the car ease and slacken and drift to a halt on the shoulder of the
road, killed the engine, waited as you squatted, wetting the
hot ground between your white blood-nailed feet: ‘look! over there!’
you whispered, and you straightened, pointed, as it came
from behind a hummock of spinifex and stopped, and it turned, it turned
and it looked and it nosed the air and it turned, walked, it
walked over a dune of sand that was red, it was red, it walked over a
dune, a red dune, a dune that was red, a dune of sand
rubbed from the land and blown dune after dune, red aeolian sand
marked with the tellings of the tracks of the passing and the
going and the scrabble of spinifex, ripples of wind, and over it walked,
over the dune, over the red, the scrub-pocked sand,
the hummock-grassed sand, the dingo, yellow and brown as the dried
yellow-brown spinifex, walked over the dune, it walked
over a dune that was red, red, RED, walking to the next, and another,
walking on, from crest to crest, from trough to crest to
trough, pawing into the slip face and the upwind face, walking the long
red distance, making its way, making its going: and later
in a room of the motel I lay and looked into your eyes as my feet stroked
at your feet and my fingers touched at your fingertips
and I tried to hold you but you would not be held and you would not hold:
‘does it really have to be this way?’ I said, and your lips
tightened, crinkled: ‘I’m sorry,’ you whispered, ‘it’s that dingo … it’s in
my head, and …,’ and you smiled a pale smile as if to
say there was nothing that could be done about the dingo and the road to
the Minilya roadhouse, to the night coach to the north:
‘if only we had more time,’ I said, and after a while you whispered that
it wouldn’t really help in the end, and you turned away,
and we lay apart in the dark, and soon outside the breeze picked up,
bristled with smells of sea and weed and wet sand and
blistered grass and eucalypt leaves that clapped, clattered, and I looked
again, again, at your head that shadowed the white pillow:
‘everyone has a dingo, or something,’ I whispered, ‘would it help to talk?’
but you were already elsewhere, and I listened instead to
your breathing that spoke of here and not here, of here and there, of
now and not, of the lightness that lies so lightly: ‘thank
you,’ I mouthed, ‘thank you, and may you go well, may you go where
you need to go’: yes, that’s how it was, how it had to be:
and now you are gone, and gone, but, and yet, still you visit me: you
still come to lie where I lie in the tentacle nights that come,
that come to steal about the bed probing and grasping as I wait to sleep,
and your head seems to rest beside me in the long silent
black and I turn to you, speak to you: ‘where are you now?’ I ask,
‘what roads have taken you?’ ‘what places have lent you
their arms?’ ‘what shapes walk in the landscape of your wanderings?’
I ask, ‘to whom do you turn when the light is choked?’:
and my eyes blink and my feet twitch as if your feet had touched at them
as I think of that hard tarmac and see again the dingo and
the dunes and the tellings of the dunes and you, dingo woman with the
blood-nailed feet, who wet the red sand of the Burkett Road in the passing of your going