Hill End, 1963

What I remember most is the terrible thirst, in that heat
     crackling underfoot and in the air,
the rocks and trees shape-changing as I went among them
     with my father and his brother –
one a classer of wool, inspector of wheat and manager
     of rural personnel – the other
a retired professor of things earthed and aerial – shells
     and minerals, birds, the under-
sides of enemy planes. It should have been enough
     to follow them into the open-
plan maps of their prospecting heads, to find the exposed
     dry ice of quartz, to watch
as they scraped and levered, unearthed and made ready
     to enter the stone for what
it might contain. I went with them into the Latin names
     for dead and living things,
hearing stories of free-standing nuggets, of how luck
     is a science demanding years
of study, how gold can be found where the trained eye falls.
     And when they hammered
pegs into the earth, and fenced the claim with string,
     the sky over Hill End
came close, with trees dissolving into it, their branches lit
     with a loud second-growth
of cicada wings. Around me, voices and wind, the tread-
     marks of boots, the uncertain
tap of hammers on the skins of stones. I waited for thirst
     to leave me, but each thought
turned to water until, with the stroke of the sun in my head,
     I sat down, within and beyond
myself, and I saw how my father was gesturing in silence
     from a square of pegged
and gleaming ground, his face now furred, now feathered.
     I’ve been told a number
of versions and times of what happened out there
     in the bush at Hill End –
how we staked out a claim with potential for gold,
     how my father discovered
a true friend in his brother…Now, I know more
     of what occurred that day:
something announced itself and set snares behind my eyes –
     something formal and free,
troubling and instructive. Thirst was all that mattered, then,
     and need was a fearful thing.
It still is, though it has other forms and names, and I
     summon them when I can,
from the mapless regions of the head. When I say heat, 
     solitude, gold, amazement,
I return to my body with the makings of new poetry.