At Uluru
the postman returns rocks
that look like they’ve been
chipped off a sunset.
They arrive in padded bags,
shoeboxes, take-away containers
from all over the world,
apologetic tourists trying to make good
or simply finding the rock
lost its strange orange glow
in the European light.
Some are stopped en route,
quarantine confiscating the little Australian boulders
and making a kind of Red Indian burial site
in the middle of the airport.
In a light plane
you see a different migration of rocks
moving like black caterpillars across the state.
Miniature grand canyons to the sea where
smelters spit fire at the sky
and mechanical donkeys
sip at troughs of oil.
At night men bang
empty cups on the pipelines
while neon women change positions
on a three-second timer.
Backpackers dance on tables
lightning bolts shaved into their pussies,
the phone numbers of temping agencies
scrawled on the back of their hands.
A Hillsong group
plays Celebrity Head with names
from the Old Testament,
a man screaming, ‘Moses!
I’m Moses! I’m fucking Moses!’
And in hotel lobbies,
people fall to their knees
fingers in the weave
to gather the dandruff
of rich men.
On deck,
a man taps his cigarette
into an upturned abalone shell,
watching the sun come up.
The hulls of the cargo ships
are heavy with rocks like the
suicide coat pockets of poets,
As they push off
– the port easing
back onto its stumps –
all the needles on
all the compasses
twig north
in the direction of iron ore
and a swarm of bees
dives into the Timor sea,
sizzling like a thousand appliances.
