The Forest
closes ranks, protecting
its last secrets.
What's left are stories,
a few photos
and digitized clips
of a tiger behind bars,
showing a marsupial pose
and bewilderment
that it should come to this:
stripes, skinned
from starkening ribs,
stretched and pinned
to a wall inscribed
with a roll call of killers.
One remaining foetus
floats in formaldehyde,
eyelids closed, oblivious
both to its demise
and the new bounty
on its head. I marvel
at the delicate solidity
of the unborn, half-
expecting the eyelid
to open and acknowledge
my disbelief that all this
is made of wood —
the animal alive
in the fluid grain — but
I can hear a gentle chisel
still at work, scrolling
furls of huon pine
to the thickening floor.
Opal
Melvin, a location scout, guides me
between the pyramids of grit
towards the burrows, all the people
turned rabbit, or mole.
He shows me the fist-width holes
drilled into his kitchen wall
to store wine, later the massive borings
that make an underground church.
Then we're picking our way
through the fossickings and man-trap
mine shafts: stumble here in the dark
and it's a matter of seconds until
you feel your spine compacting
to dust. Melvin leads me in
by a safer, steadier descent
through the labyrinth — glowing red
with shafts of man-trap light
that now let us breathe — while he
turns trickster, a pair of copper rods
bent into his grip and randomly
swivelling. It has to be a con — yes? —
but as I take the rods in my own hands
I sense the circuitry, the subtle tug
of a living compass formed
by my trembling grasp as I'm drawn
to the thick, silicate streak in the rock,
a milky rainbowed cloud, enough
to make the live wires swing suddenly
apart in a sort of ecstasy. I stare
at the irrefutable gleam, jism
splashed through mother earth,
diffracting the light into pure bliss.
Potch the lot of it, surely, but Melvin
— with what licence I don't know —
breaks a piece from the crumbling wall
and presents it. To me. A gift. For you.