EXMOUTH: CAPE RANGE
Yardie Creek: Blue And Red, And White Corellas
corellas that go in flocks to feed,
the creek sprinkled with the white feathering and the crying, and chuckling, and the shrilling,
and someone stops, wipes the sweat:
‘anyone for water?’ and we sip, and we walk,
stopping at small stations:
the fringing coastal mangroves,
the eroded limestone, layered,
the jagged crags, heads,
the torrented rock,
the wallabies, black-footed on a ledge,
the slate-grey egrets roosting in a crevice,
the view back to the white line of the ocean:
stopping at small stations:
the bend, and bend, of the blue,
the deep blue, deeper than lobelia blue,
deeper than morning iris blue,
deep as the blue of the bluebells, rough, that cluster at the sides of roads, along rivers, cling to dunes,
this blue that tongues between the walls that rise steep, red,
the red more red than the bark of the gimlet gum,
red perhaps as the rust of the bacon and eggs pea
or the rust of the eye of the prickly bitter pea,
peas that bush and blush where we walk in the hills in the cool and wet of the year
when snakes sleep, when corellas make nest:
:
stopping at small stations:
the rock figs that twist from cracks,
the zebra finches, scarlet-billed,
the stunted acacia scrub,
the gullies, and the breaks,
the lizards, speckled, paused on their rocks in the heat of the sun,
the ospreys in a thermal, steering,
the white tour boat searching, searching, searching up the creek:
and the rush of corellas as they go in flocks to feed,
as they split and mend, split, switching and cutting and lacing as they arc, reel:
white fleetings, and hungerings, screamings,
that pinch, bite at the heart