CARAVAN PARK
Geographe Bay: Dawn
‘all sites have full hook-up facilities’
‘all sites are shaded by established trees’
all sites are occupied by sleeping families
and nothing stirs all black night
among the beetled vans and tents
that shelter beneath the hanging
peppermint myrtles:
nothing stirs but leaves, black, that pat,
they tap, as and when the air
adjusts, it shifts:
nothing stirs but leaves, and a possum
scratching at bark as it leaps,
scrambles, claws rasping, white-
tipped tail curling to grasp:
a possum that rustles, clambers among
branches as it scouts, hunts for shoots,
white flowers of the myrtles:
a possum that knows not to stray, roam,
but to keep to its trees, and it
sprays as it clasps, making its
country, remaking its country:
and through the night, nothing that stirs
but the leaves, and the possum,
and the sleeping travellers who
turn and kick as they sleep for
the day that will break, all else
being still, so still, so very still,
waiting, and waiting:
and dawn, then dawn comes, it comes,
and then with the breaking a
child cries out, it cries, it cries
as if it knows, as if it really
knows, somehow it knows:
and a poly-cotton annexe is zipped
open and a gas jet hisses and
the door of a ute slams and
a mouth yawns at a window
of a Jayco eighteen-footer
and a man rubs his eyes as
he trudges to the ablution
block where he spouts into
a trough of staled yellow and
curlies and sodden filters of
Marlboro, Longbeach, Peter
Jackson, Winfield:
reddening dawn, roseate dawn,
sweet and beautiful dawn,
as poets might voice it,
a sacred time, they might well say,
as day declares, unseals,
reveals what has to be revealed,
no more, no less:
reveals the sky, insistent sky, persistent,
that presses, bears down, holds sway:
reveals the grey-greenness of the heath
and the bush, the daisy bush
and the basket bush, the salt
bush, that squat on the dunes
that hunch along the bay:
reveals the rough fibrous grey-brown
bark, furrowed, of the trees
that spread, hanging down
over the numbered sites where
people, chocked and pegged,
cough, they sniff, mutter:
and reveals the butts stubbed into the
trampled thin-grassed sands
among the tossed bottle-tops
and the bits of plastic and the
teddy-bear eyes of broken glass
that stare forever, stare almost forever:
and reveals the sandals chucked from
sweaty feet, the damp towels
smelling of damp, the scuffed
balls, muddied bicycles, dead coals,
a T-shirt that lies where it was dropped:
SAVE THE TREES PLEEZ:
and reveals the flies that buzz about the
wheelie-bins rich with peelings
and scraps and bones, greasy tins
emptied of sweetcorn, baked beans,
Greenseas tuna (chunky, in vegetable oil):
and reveals the bikies lying senseless
beside black bikes and a stuff-
off-and-get-a-life youth who
scowls from a daggy swag
and a woman puffing at a smoke
as she claws through a box of food:
and reveals the dew-wet vans and tents
that glitter as the light strikes at
them, as it strikes at them, as it
strikes at them:
all is dawn, all is become day, all is lit
and told, revealed, but not where
the possum hides in a leaf-lined
hollow above, above, high among
the weeping peppermints