PERTH AND FREMANTLE
Biking Rotto
hired bikes and pedalled hard for Porpoise
Bay and lay on sand dry, warm, and listened
to the black-headed terns crying, crying,
croaking as they cried, as they trotted, as
they fossicked at the tide line, and we
listened and listened until their cries had
screamed us empty, and then we lay quietly
in the tender water quiet and turquoise that
cleaned, how it cleaned, and we watched the
water tongue at the sand and rocks and the
limestone headlands and the reef platforms
and the islands little more than remnant rock,
it mouthed and tongued, washed upon them,
and it fussed about them, and fretted at them
and we biked on through wind-crazed bodies
of melaleuca lanceolata to Parker Point and
from Parker Point to Salmon Point where
ospreys curved above us as we chased, and
they circled, shrieked, they veered, circled
shrieking, looking to plunge, beaks hooked,
razored, and we edged along Salmon Bay
on past the beach of sanderling that legged at
the foam as it reached, it shrank, and pushed
up Wadjemup Hill and tramped the steps of
the bright white tower reaching into the blue,
lechenaultia blue, it reached into that blue
as it stared out at the round of ocean that
bosomed all that could be seen and not seen
‘so much bleedin’ water!’ a woman gurgled,
and she patted her face with a tissue, peered
from her sunnies, ‘makes ya think, don’t it?’
then on, wheeling, the road through dull
dark grey and green prickle-lily tangle, going,
going, and breathing salt and wild rosemary,
the air burning, streaming, and getting to
Wilson Bay and getting to Cape Vlamingh
that points west, pointing at the broad,
pointing beyond the bound, and taking the
track among bearded heath and coastal daisy
bush, silvery, and sea heath flowering white
and pink to the shearwater burrows grubbed
into sand among thick-fingered mats of
pigface and chewing sweet tart apples as we
eyeballed the water below, slapping, it beat,
scouring, broke beating at the unwilling rock
and we pumped a tyre, hit the road, peering
down at rocky bays, beaches, shores, where
ice plant grasped along the sand, where
bristle-headed spinifex longifolius tufted
down towards the sea, and pedalling on,
riding for the salt lakes fringed with shrubby
samphires, and red salt-wort, and salt bush,
grey, and starred white with banded stilts
that poked and they sickled for shrimp in the
thick opaque water, and stopping, stopped
as a dugite, brown, slow, crossed the road,
it crossed the hot bitumen, it crossed, lay
slack among hackles of rusted grass, gazed
with steady eyes, eyes glinting, and knowing
‘chuck something!’ and a water bottle spun
and the long body flicked, unlooped, it slid,
and a whoop bust out: ‘get lost, ya ratbag!’
and then back skirting Lake Baghdad to
Geordie Bay: developers’ teeth: upper and
lower sets: villas that grin over the bay:
FUUUUCK: and got the hell out of there,
punching to Thomson Bay and to deposits
back on the bikes and dollars for drinks at
the Quokka Arms, and spread legs outside
marking the late afternoon middy by middy
and heeding the mooring floats fuse with the
pale
darkening pale water that licked, and it
licked, and remarking the last cormorants that
cut, they trimmed, that skimmed low to the
rocky outcrops to sleep as netballers drank
piss, yelled Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oy Oy Oy
and soon, too soon but that’s the way things
go, too soon the sun’s yellow breeze, sweet,
comforting, turned to wind, south west, and
the wind turned cold, bouncing salty from
the sea as the lights of the city sprigged,
prinked, quivering under the charge of
night’s fires, the fevering mathematics of
the keeping and of making, unmaking, and
when a wind blows deep as bone and cold
as black and the stars howl of nothing and
everything all you can do is to run for cover,
and we ran, ran to the cabin, down the road
where we had seen a quokka dead under a
bush beside a glassy-eyed Emu Bitter stubby