Coorong, a return
 

1.
From the air, Australia is like
a snake, sloughing skin into the sea

felted hills, twisted rivers, fog 
like milk webbed in the feet of the valleys

long slow lagoons, stain of sediment
the land porous.

I am seeing it as they could not,
the aircraft executing its approach

geometry above the imprecision
of clouds – so much we cannot fathom:

the depth of fog, faulted and fissured
striated country, cast in cloud shadow

uniform for a time, then morphing
into processional cumulus

ridges like waves of an ancient echo
audible now, as fire trails walk its flanks.

2.
In 1853 they heaved around
Cape Horn in a ship cut down, hand built in

Nova Scotian cold, men sent ashore
clothed in the hopes of their clans, this coast

called South Australia, repellant –
desert they said; these children of granite

and peat, piteous winters in their eyes
could not till sand.  The equal measures

of relief and dread in the women when
the sails filled again, the first ship of three

pushed on to Sydney by westerly gales
and bush destiny in a kauri swamp.

3.
Was there then this flotilla of pelicans,
crabs cast, carapace-down in the mud

dessication of parrot-jawed fish,  
flounder, puffer, hooded plovers to bob

and stitch over shell banks, between samphire
in hues of heliotrope and olive

colonising the brackish margin of scrub,
resting place for spent marram heads, bleached

seagrass caught in the hair of the drowned. 
This is the meagre haunt of ground parrot

green as imagination, and mouseish wren.
What  is water here?  

4.
Goolwa, meaning elbow, from the
Ngarrindjeri people of the Coorong;

and kurangh, meaning neck, narrow or long.
Lagoon, the joining place, barrage and bridge

pin your limbs together, Younghusband
Ewe, Hindmarsh, Mundoo – a modern

taxonomy, their antecedents
unspoken now.

5.
At thirty thousand feet seahorse heads of
silt rear out from your skin; your limbs yellow

then black, stretch southeast like a painting on the
blue cave of the ocean. Now a marina

blooms like the crimson algae thickening
the current line offshore. From above,

things spread in the same fashion, the algae
a filigree on the sea, silt rearing up

the marina, veins bulging, a growth on
the hip of Hindmarsh Island, whose secret

splayed out by the bridge, stark as the absence
of women’s words and children. 

6.
Goolwa, your elbow, still curls. The town settled
like so many shells, sticks, bones; an eddy

undisturbed by flood, the great river port
strangled.  Each afternoon, with digital precision

flocks form and rise above you,
the sky a monitor of black peaks and falls

apex formations fusing into drift lines,
prelude to migration. Had their first ship

rested here with only the ambition of birds,
how would I perceive you?

7.
At Murray Mouth a pair of sand dredges
start up; their black diesel breath

drifts like a pelican’s glide into roost
the dredges move, alien, insatiable.

Nearer to shore, a Pacific gull is
caught in a slow dance with prey

too heavy to bear away, beats upwind only for
both to fall like line and sinker to the shoal,

the length of each carry
weighed with need; harried by common gulls,

muddy wings lifted clear of the chop, it
gathers itself. Coorong, where is your relief?

The weight of the river slackens, your
urgency is in the slow shift of sand,

your mouth at once open, closing over
your limbs pinned. Let the great basin heave

flush the barrages, dissolve shell and midden,

©Kate Waterhouse