And the gully becomes an impatient child
waking you at five am,
chattering its unsullied excitement.
The birds fill the early light with their paper-tearing,
but are tiny and polite,
expressing a cool turn-taking sanity, unlike
those heat-mad demons of the Top End
that woke me that first night.

The week I spent with the crazy birds of Noonemah
was the brutal awakening that broke the
sappy dream-threads
of my sedentary, more southerly life.
Our problem is attitudinal, he said, long-distance,
and when I hung up, we both danced in the kitchen
a lewd squat,
chanting his dumb antipodean mumbo-jumbo:
attitudinal, attitudinal, we leered,
our bums arched back and our sweating thighs splayed
like some big-arsed black mambo mamas of the steamy,
shin-gleamy jungle.

All that citronella-soaked week, out bush,
I was drugged on the scent of mosquito coils-
spiraling, heady, hip-heavy with lust.
It was a ceaseless, pyrethrum night-lust
and I couldn’t get enough poison into me.
I lay pinned under the heaving, cleaving black belly
of the topsy-turvy night,
and it filled me, stilled me,
with its sticky, killing juice.

I am so horny for the night, I told Loli,
through a confession-grille of mosquito-wire.
She seared shreds of purple buffalo steak
and we watched the rain
breaking its tepid waters down the twin trunks
of the white tree
that held up the middle of the big, dark
Noah’s Ark of a house.
At the base, a circle of river-stones
made obscene slurping sounds of the rain.

Then,
back out into the donga each night,
and how I craved the
amniotic lightlessness,
where I found myself drugged
inside a soporific cavern of bat-webbing blackness.
Its vibrations hummed me to sleep.
And the Brahmin calves,
and their slack-eyed mothers,
and the persistent hoof-scuffling of a baby boar.
And, in the crazy ward of the dawning,
the paranoid ravings and warnings of the mad morning birds.

I never saw them,
but they clambered and cussed and connived
as the sun threatened to come up
with their daily medication.

Who knows what they were?
The I-am-Jesus-Christ-risen-from-the-dead bird?
the everybody-is-talking-inside-my-head bird?
the clicketty-click hit-me-with-your-rhythm-stick bird?

I loved those crazy birds.
They came to me at the early hour
of my own sticky-sweet and murderous madness.

That was the week I remembered to sleep the sleep;
it was the week the membrane grew back over
the slit-eyed stigmata of
my cold-climate martyrdom.