Memory of West

Memory of West

It comes with the turning of the head neck sinews clumping

at various times of the day: wobbling memory a flight

eighty, ninety cockatoos between Darwin and Taylor Square. These thoughts can breathe – O, breathe so heavily, je suis... je suis un vue... un vue du phare du Port Jackson. Je suis perdu.

I’ve seen solitude gobble up feathers with its rearing head and shit a post‐colonial dreaming track. Shit,

I’ve seen solitude
curling around red trunks, soaring
memory. The Hyde
Park mouth: breath
of an eaten evening. Wadeye
knits strings we strain

forward with the confidence of dimension. Poetry grabs a brush

painting night time.

Wasn’t it you who said one of these stories could be told in bits and pieces? In time

in time, all will be discovered. Never without it. The searing centre point pricks an eye, a bubble of blood bulging out

hardening with time, soon a fossil without it in the middle of a land moving on, declining to turn.

Stuart Cooke