Apricot Press

through scrubland, through seedbank
through boulder, through burrow
through water bore, through grain store
through hummock, through tussock
through claypan, through basin

find me a trace of the Mulga King

through swamp edge, through lake bed
through exposed root, through plunge pool
through cavity, through deep valley
through sandy loam, through ironstone
through red earth, through bloodwood

pick up the pace of the Mulga King

through eucalypt, through sprinkle pit
through plateau, through sinkhole
through sand plain, through stony range
through herbfield, through foxtail
through acacia, through copper-burr

go face-to-face with the Mulga King

through nut bush, through brown top
through overgraze, through gibber plains
through billabong, through winterlong
through samphire, through trench corridor
through cattlebone, through fracture zone

not a drop we waste from the Mulga King


*King Brownsnake Pseudechis australis

Agkistrodon piscivorus

Preachers and dastards walk these parts,
the latter each carry a medical valise
flipped to reveal vials of antivenin,
mini defibrillators and battery packs;
the former anoint this bandit country,
the sagebrush and palmetto, with buffalo milk.
These be-damned plains.

                           Enter the herp-head
on the scout for a specimen with his Handycam
and snake tongs to canvas the likely locales:
the drainage ditches, deadfall, culverts, crevices,
basking in a stricken backhoe’s pail.

                          Alone on a stump, a tannish, blotted
sylph but smooth as microfiche, a lethal whorl
that warns with its gape, white as an opera glove
and the dirk tongue a snook to evolution, tasting
the heat of the weekend wrangler tip-toeing
through the tall grass, guided by the smell of wetlands,
a stream’s gossip, how the power lines ended an acre back.

             These lands, part myth-garden under auspices
of barbarian law, part no-go terrain where shamed
lawmen trampous, in fits of anaphylaxis.

Photo credit: Aaron Fernando