Simpsons Gap

I met a man walking the Larapinta under the solstice sun.

Though the same stars winked at us night after night,

he was off before dawn and tucked in swag when I arrived

in camp. And then one dusky afternoon in Simpsons Gap,

the West Macdonnell ranges glowed of desert blood,

and I saw a red river gum rise out of the dry riverbed

that snaked through the gap between the daggered rocks.

And I stopped and wondered at its barnacled fables

and marvelled at the leaning trunk, its unapologetic girth

that guzzled the inverted stream. Behind the peeling

scabs of bark, vessels drew up an underworld

of water into the arms of heaven, which sheltered

black-footed rock-wallabies under a sky turned amber,

with scarlet hues. And there were the fissures,

the years of drought, the downpours, the thunderclaps.

Ten thousand blows, red from the east and red from the west.

The man was in camp that night, and I told him of the tree.

And he told me how, in his youth, he swung

on its boughs and hung off them to see the world upturned.

He lives two thousand miles away these days, but, he said,

this river gum, I marvelled at, stands him firmly in his country.