in Darwin they call it the build-up, sleeping in the donga,
alone, except for the cottony gecko scat
scattered through my sheets

flutes of hollowed bamboo
breathe a peculiar music,
and confusions of trills in the wet dark are droplets,
brackish or fresh,
the weird birds unknowable, unimaginable,
they sound like mad ventriloquests
throwing the voices of fake felt macaws
into the steamy corners of the night

the dark leans against the mosquito wire walls
and I know straightaway
I was born to scuff this stone underfoot;
the night air moving over me my bare arms
above the sheets
or lying on my stomach my hands cradling the pillow
the sounds of the night birds oh!

a wild baby pig grunting pacing the dirt
with its tiny hooves
outside the door in the early hours
I let the night in between my legs
I let the night...................let the night
and arch at the wild unseen
moving........moving......my throat
arrested
I cry out
like one of those strange unnameable
birds

back in Hobart
three degrees
and winding over the saddle through the snow
listening to a didgeridoo, displaced;
and I tell him, It was thirty-three when I left.

Home, and a boobook owl
pops the night with its questions:
pop (silence)
.............pop (silence)
.............................pop