THE BABY MAGPIE'S CATWALK

Two weeks before leaving my life here,

fleeing the familiar nest

for one I wanted once, in France,

I tidy up. Wind has declared my bush gully's clothing

out of date. Now last year's sleeves

are fallen leaves, tatty patchwork underfoot.

Lantana, baring its spine, deciduously dreaming

too high toward lost light,

snaps and cracks, necklacing a line of blood

like tiny teeth marks over my throat.

(Paris, on the SBS News, shows fashions for next

winter -

and swoons under a 'tropical' downpour.)

It is 'winter' here. The native lily-like crinums

long ago pleated their pink sunbonnets away.

But still sun through jungle shadows

melts the cassias' yellow berets

and turns the tall paddles of the crinum leaves

to appliqués of this season's finest

crushed velvet, stitched above the gully's dark canoe

in a salute of unfashionable, exhilarating lime-green.

(Hats are big on the Paris catwalks -

chapeaux of feathers, twitchy fledglings

on tree-thin models with bored, magnolia-blossom

heads.)

I study the satin slippers of the first

freesia buds. Rosellas embroider fireworks

in the casuarinas, rivalling my footpath's parade

of wattle capes. Bees, bees fill the morning

with a foreign buzz the flashbulbs fizz out in Paris

suddenly machine gun bursts of French report

and I can't resurrect

the girl I used to be, navy-pleated, pristine-collared,

reciting Verlaine, Ronsard, Victor Hugo .. .

Il pleure, I think I hear last year's baby magpie

alone under an anorexic ironbark

contrarily rejoicing. Or did he sing il pleut?

I waver between the shining drops of his voice,

clumsily translating

now tears, now rain-already lost

in Paris, where I am going, where it is raining-

chiffon-showering, silver-shocking the air

with shivers no more malevolent

than this bird,

querulously lifting his beak, threading his voice

miraculously up to a mother-of-pearl button moon.

Unwittingly at risk on this catwalk,

still the magpie glosses optimism over the bees,

winging tremulous and determined as travellers

through the wattle's long weep.

He has so far to go yet, this slow bird

struggling with his strange gift

but while lantana canes point

at sky squeaked bare as a blackboard

under my feet I feel the old leaves turn

and the compost of years soften-

as over the drought-struck, burnt-black heartland

pragmatically now he sizzles promises

of tears and rain

soothing their transforming clothing

overme and over these suddenly

precious plants, about to be left.