The Future Keepers
By Nandi Chinna
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The Future Keepers - Nandi Chinna
Acknowledgements
TERROIR
TERROIR
As long as it takes to make the world,
the ferrous country rises and wears away;
black cockatoos alight in paperbark canopies,
the earth keeps spinning inside the window of the glass.
Not wanting to drink alone
I raise a charge to my shadow,
but she is already giddy
with the scent of blue scaevola and red-eyed wattle.
Along the flower ridge to the salt life
windblown honey myrtle binds the cliffs,
humpback whales ride the Leeuwin Current south;
a wave rises and breaks in my mouth.
Down through the peppermint forest
and the body’s long hours,
bees hum between marri and grape;
sap is rising in the arteries of the vine.
The afternoon is measured out in rows.
I pass through gated paddocks;
cows graze the pasture grass,
the loam of their making shining from their faces.
The creek rounds the cusp of the hill.
Purling under the thick beams of the bridge,
Wilyabrup Brook tastes like rain; and the earth
keeps spinning inside the window of the glass.
My shadow will not join me;
she ripples away, dissolving into leaves and stones.
The bottle is empty, but the flowers
keep blooming on my tongue.
COCKBURN SOUND
This morning I have spent hours
picking up sea hares from the beach
and tossing them carefully back into the sea.
A marine biologist would say
that I’m wasting my time,
that sea hares beach themselves
this time of year. After mating
and setting their eggs adrift
in spirals of glistening ribbon,
they give themselves up to the damage of surf,
denting against the shore
like giant, homeless snails.
But this time last week it was the stars,
1, 2, 6, then dozens of stars,
whole constellations fallen from orbit,
broken out of space, slipping in and out
with the tide, tripping over each other
in their impatience to curl up
and die on the beach.
Then the useless task of gathering them up
against their inclinations,
spinning them back into the water.
Out in the Sound a dredge ploughs the seabed
relentlessly back and forth.
I stare out, a purple sea hare limp in my hands,
wondering how much more the sea can spit out,
how much more it can take.
LEAVING ROTTNEST
After boarding the ferry I close my eyes,
feel the swell surging in sympathy
with the blood pumping through my heart muscle;
hold the island in those chambers,
hold the sea wind on the south-west bluff,
the osprey circling, diving, returning
with a pearly slash of salmon.
On the ferry’s TV the West Coast Eagles are slaughtering
the Greater Western Sydney Giants,
and I’m repeating names like mantras:
Scaevola crassifolia, Westringia, Spinifex, Lepidosperma gladiatum,
seaberry, saltbush, samphires, sedges, Rottnest Island pines;
picturing the welcome swallows
careening above coastal rosemary,
ancient coral reefs split open on the shore,
and the eye’s wide gaze across to the blur
of harbour and commerce that is Fremantle.
As the ferry speeds towards the mainland
the island grows huge inside me;
as seen from above;
a leafy sea dragon
adrift in the Indian Ocean.
ASTRONOMY
My niece has never slept outside before
so we drag our swags onto the back lawn,
but sleep is impossible with the soughing
and creaking of the shadowy pine forest,
the stars illuminating our faces.
She’s imagining wolves, and monsters
stalking the periphery of our camp,
but it’s the animals of the galaxy
who pace and