1
The far margin of wintering wetlands,
mist before sunrise. Outside my window
a rock parrot is perched on its fence-post.
All things face east, drawn to the memory
of heat. Except my unassisted heart.

Here, even the lichens have perfected
the art of belonging. Fungal hypha,
appliqued on branch and stone, are hosting
algae. Cells sip the light. Their tattoos map
an ancient co-existence in saffron,
fluorescent relief on which no X marks
‘you are here’. Slow to decode its salt-marsh
lexicon, in this landscape I need more
than time for solitude. I want belief.

2
To you, for the first time (your strength, then,
just rumour, ripeness) my raven lustre
was broken-winged, but not untouchable.

I became your prayer for temptation, you
drank my cup of shame as inacedia,
where the longing for water is holy.

Other men I’ve known spoke empire, conquest,
riches.  You walked on water, considered
the mustard seed, said (beneath a fruitless
tree), ‘this cave is a womb of parables’.

Words peeled, leaves curved foetal, pelagic moths
took flight in amniotic sky. I’d cross
all lines to talk again if untime could
salve, reprise that other way you spoke.

3
These geckos could be stone. Memory of
breathing reversed. A granite petroglyph,
shade-thin, measures fissures, concavities,
intuits overhangs, angles of descent.

Pre-verbal, instinct risks contact skin first.
As with fingers, mouth, our eyelids opaque,
we sensed flesh as lizards might feel country,
spine to sun. As when we read touch, lay soft
bellied, uncut on obsidian blades.

I trusted contours until your spittle
and clay healed my eyes, opened me to day’s
brittle light, its delible vows. Translate
me from doubt, I prayed, knowing all mirage
was lie, wanting to believe your version.

4
Will you return? Once, before autumn dusk
swallowed stump and roo, I saw a shadow,
thought I heard the almost music of you.
Was that just the lake, little rock pools lipped
by breakgrace ripples, reed-hushed, reaching shore?

The last hour of light is holiest,
water and incense, litanies of frog
choirs in stalls of sideways sun; midges,
dust motes spiralling the treeline to smoke.

I was your devotee. You were moisture
soaking beneath salt-crusts. You were landfall
to exhausted flocks. Your presence promised
seasons of seepage after drought. When you
breathed, rainclouds formed like pietà on the hills.

5
No more. The wedge-tail’s sharp diagonal
is etched on clear evening sky. Beneath him,
high in the acacia, a lizard slows
as daylight ebbs, muscles grow cold. Expect
a death. Over wild landscape –   north   east   south
west  –  the raptor wheels. I watch, want to catch
his dive, wait (as I always wait) for night

to unlatch its mouth. After devotion,
this is left: writing on air; vigilant
silence (dark’s relation, its other self);
litanies of lost names, hooded plover,
black cockatoo. I have kept only your
bright Aleph,first letter which divided
all horizons and may still bring down walls.

6
On this night, Arctic’s curlew sandpipers
arrive like petit point crossing the moon,
descend with aching wings and hearts that thread
the hessian salt marsh to pellucid sky.

They shed flight’s wind-worn robe, its ravelled seams,
creases that charted paths to sanctuaries
like these, where ghostly frames retrieve their strength.
I recognise their exiles’ weariness.

We are all wayfinders at journey’s end,
reprieved by patchwork wetlands, these furthest
out-posts of spring. Seasons have passed. I changed
my life and at first light, will watch them wade,
curved bills stitching water, insistently dip
dipping, feeding the hunger to leave.