Godforsaken place where you can mark time for days, a whole damn autumn,
without seeing anyone, only sometimes hearing a strange car
grating gravel on the top road, or meaningful footsteps in the house
across the creek at midnight. Or the ugly dog up the gully crying like a bunyip.
It might be easy to think you were being watched, if you went out
in the mossy dark, and just before finding Tchingal and Bunya,
two green eyes appeared in the shapeless black under the big peppermint gum;
not jittering or sliding, just waiting.
There is a man up the end of the gully who has hung
threadbare blankets over his windows, and rarely goes out
now the days are so short. One night he fired a shot into the bush,
he told us. He couldn’t stand it any more, he said. Being watched.
Today I took the key out of the back door, and when the dog barked,
I stopped and wondered, and looked down toward the creek,
toward the willows bare and pink-brushed like skeletons,
and the tussocks of sedges crowding in the slumps of the old orchard furrows
like mourners, and the mustard-apple lancewoods reaching up in surprise,
and the low-slung blackwoods burgeoning downward in suspense.
Anything could be out there, biding its time, silently drawing a bead on you.
Perhaps it’s down there now, watching.
Waiting for its chance.
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