CARAVAN PARK
Cervantes: Morning
‘let’s camp here,’ someone says, and so we do,
and we pitch the tents, tapping the pegs deep
into the grassy sand, and we set out the fold-up
chairs and crack a few tinnies and pull open a
packet of barbecue crisps and nod to a woman
who walks from the laundry and hangs out her
washing and she hitches her trackies, she pats
at her hair, and she slops to a van shackled to a
weatherboard cabin and shakes off her thongs
at the steps where a grizzled blue heeler dozes,
and it stirs as she closes the door, it licks at its
dugs, sniffs the thongs, lies back in the sunlight:
‘dogs don’t know any better,’ Jason declares,
‘but we who are people smell our own socks: what does that tell ya?’
but we don’t know what it tells us, and we shrug, and squeeze at our tinnies, and count the cuckoos that ride the air:
cuckoos that, untroubled by the vans, cabins,
the tents, beat, darting, the sky, sing, sing as
if the hour, the day, the season, is too short
not to sing, as if all that matters in the end is
to sing, as if they have no reason but to sing,
flung to joy, and so they sing, pallid cuckoos,
eyes yellow-belted, that vault racketing, they
flit, exult, sing-whistling, they sing and again
and yet once more and again and so they sing
on and on through the hours, on, still on, as the
sun reaps ground, walking bare, inescapable,
they sing on as the breeze heaves and it begs,
it claims, as it does at Cervantes, needles and
prods, tugging, clutching, and still the electric
cuckoos sing, sweet-throated dwellers of the
day and sky, seizing their coursing, uttering
their domain above the crouching vans where
road-tired voyagers lay their heads, they lay
down their heads: vans to rent and vans for
sale and vans with built-on bits that stay, are
stopped, coupled to the ground and vans that
roll on from place to place to wherever some
road leads to find a place that might be right:
‘shit will happen,’ Jason declares, ‘I’m telling
you, it will happen, one day it will surely happen’, and we wonder
what he means, and he points to the blouses, bras, the panties, socks
that jerk in the breeze: ‘bird shit!’ he shouts:
and the odds, we ask? more of a chance than
winning bloody win-your-dream-life lotto, we say,
and, yes, that day will come as it must, we say,
as we view the blameless dog and the woman’s
salt-dulled van punctured by gaps of glass shut
tight against the tongue of the breeze that will
not lie, it will not be silent, it will not: and we
watch, listen, listen, as the cuckoos, flashing,
boast the sky, and they whistle, sing rejoicing
in their wings, sing above the vans: tired vans
that rust in the breeze with no heart left for the
road, and vans that gleam in the sun as they
wait to wander on, to carry on, to roll on, to
take again the road that’s to be taken, the long
hot, the hard road, black, to find a place for
a night or a week, whatever, rolling, rolling on