I'm on holidays with my family in Port Douglas, Yirrganydji country, and all week have been struck by a sense of the hidden properties in the landscape here, like the hidden properties in narrative - of the underneath elements in the water and forest and the streets, in the heat.
Hidden Properties
Box jellies,
Biancaea decapetala,
spiders the size of two hands,
drunks who laugh too hard.
Coconuts.
Rain that soaks a shirt in ten steps.
Something in the seaweed that makes you red.
Boulders and branches:
swept out of the boat and into the torrent,
breathless.
Silence and shadows.
Exiles in floral shirts,
shy sharks.
Reef edges.
