CARAVAN PARK
Carnarvon: Noon
tropical gardens and banana plantations and caravans that flock to rest:
and he sticks his head through the door: ‘what’s goin’ on in here?’
‘jiggin’,’ she says, ‘woman’s business: what else would I be doin’ with me time?’
she jigs at a thousand-piece puzzle of Turner’s The Shipwreck,
fossicking in a tray for bits of sky, bits of sea, brooding, and gauging, testing:
the bruised, furied storm clouds, and the black heaving waters,
torn white, and the flimsy tossing boats, and the castaways, travellers that hope
without hope, shrunk in the vast, as men steer, strain at oars against
the thrust, the snatch, the drag of the dice, the cup, the portion, the march, the lot:
she has the outline fixed, the frame is there, but that’s the easy part:
the heart of it must be pieced together if the solution is to be pulled from the jumble
and yet she cannot lose unless she quits for she has the image
before her and all she has to do is model after it, but she mutters, shakes her head,
toys with a piece, paws at another piece, dithering, turns to glance
through the window at a raven, shiny black as wet bitumen at night, that caws,
it caws, carps and it caws: ‘Jim!’ she yells, ‘give that crow a
boot up the bum, will ya?’ but Jim’s gone: where’s the bastard, what’s he up to now?
men’s business it is, as he slopes around the park perimeter,
mooches among the vans, campers, motorhomes, nodding g’day, noting the arrivals,
inspecting the rigs, reckoning the costs, comparing the options,
and he stops at the fish cleaning bench where blokes are filleting silvered pinkies
and he stops to chat to Les and Hazel from Geelong who came
in last week from Exmouth: ‘we done fifteen thousand kays in seven months,’ they say,
and they glisten as their twenty-three foot ensuite rig glistens
in the noon light of the Capricorn sun that makes every traveller sweat, and now he’s wet,
and he’s seen the day, and he knows how things stand and he
knows that things are as they are and he feels it would be nice if they were otherwise but
what can you do, and he pads on to the swimming pool and leans
on the fence and watches the cocksure bodies that lie about on the bright green grass
and splash easily, freely in the impossibly blue blue and he wishes
he were young again but what can you do, and he hurries on, hurries back to his woman:
‘where’ve ya been?’ she yells, ‘where’s me noon-time grog?’
and he taps from a cask and they sip, nibble at crackers, as the raven caws, waiting:
tropical gardens and banana plantations and caravans that stray like sheep