Note: see the poet's introduction to this poem

Breakfast

Anyone up this early - it’s just after dawn - is going to be overwhelmed by the glimmering of things. The grasses, the rocks, the bluff and its shelves, inland hakeas, casuarinas, some sort of mountain ash, I’m not sure which. Then the black-veined, opalescent smear of lake which fills up the middle ground, a long expanse of daybreak light on water. Down there, squalls of wind pockmark the water’s surface, as if it’s been scattered with grit. Up here it’s completely windless, while, far away through the air’s greyness, the opposite side’s wide blond plain starts coming clear - it’s a shore of unfenced grazing country (now as I look) dotted with trees.

Dark cover which starts half way up those slopes turns out to be just more trees, thicker, more dense. If this side’s anything to go by, mainly storm-battered yellow box and hakeas. Above them, along the ridge’s tops a band of white glow takes the northerly skyline. Of course, distance across water can easily fool: those trees are fifteen kilometres away.

...Something close to that. (The sky’s getting paler and paler.)

Air’s already dry, resonant with the months of drought we’ve been having. Overhead, two streaked vapour trails broaden into hastily brushed scumble - gigantic scribble marks crazily laddered across vacancy. It’s as if someone’s leant them there, knowing they’d make an optical illusion, puzzling to work out. They can’t be Sydney with its curfew. (“Melbourne to Darwin, Melbourne to Singapore,” I’m thinking.) And over here: a steep drop down to a fishing-jetty where the camp-sites are wrongly

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A crow sheers away in the trees beneath this slope. It knows its caw-caw’s have been heard a thousand times before. So common I instantly forget it. I’m not trying to fix the two crimson rosellas, either, which have been rough-housing inside a gangly, smashed tree directly to the left. Their presence easily slips beneath awareness, too. They’ve quietened for a moment into typical chitter-chatter within a high pitched half-squealing. The sound’s “sweet”: glistening like a stem of blood-red berries.

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The entire memory of waking, a quarter of an hour ago, might also be handed back to forgetfulness, incurring no loss. Together with its other pristine sight: the long-limbed grey kangaroo stretched out on the grass with her two young. (It’s a while before I see them). The dry white grass where they’re lying is beaten down, as if this is a regular sleeping-place. The mother’s reclining on her flanks, the joeys are hunched over grazing. When they see me they don’t panic but get up slowly. They’re eyeing me. Very carefully. Ignoring me, as if they know the speed with which they can vanish into air. Right there, a “vanishing act” is exactly what they do. I look out across a turquoise braid of water for a few seconds. When I look back they’ve not been fooled. Quiet as noiseless wind, they’ve left

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Too easy to say that could be the day’s excitement.

And the results of dawn twilight’s scattered happenings?

Why fix them unless there’s some pressure, some disturbance?

Isn’t it enough just to be a hunter of images, a hunter of things?

Is it the scale of this water which dislocates?

Years after it’s been put here, it never quite fits.

Will it never accommodate this double valley’s contours?

Are its pearl-blue acreages shore-nibbled, spread-eagled?

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Hard, then, not to fit in what’s over there on the left, two or three kilometres away. I knew it was there. It shifts the drama of the moment like a sudden cut in a movie. Every motive, every gesture has to be re-examined. It’s the rear view of the half-exposed dam wall and, past it, a spur jutting out into the lake: a drowned quarry abstractly chopped out from what’s left of a hillside. A sliced half of a hill, cut apart as if by a sea.

So now it looks like an enormous mass of water is bearing down on the rock face: every ripple carries weight, every windrow blusters towards it. The sense it gives (the half-thought-out link) is water piling up before an island’s vertical cliffs. The whole movement builds pressure like an immense oceanic space, but then of course there’s the wall of the dam, saying: No, this is not an island. We’re far over the Dividing Range. This is inland, not island.

The truth is: the lake’s being human, humanly made, offers the viewer a hugeness not that different from transcendence. It dwarfs any thought of it. Only a dream-fragment can be kept in mind. Floods roar down gulleys like a front of wild horses. Natural lakes are (bad rhyme) the sky’s eyes. Was I dreaming that? When? (A line close to one already in another poem might be: This lakes’s wind-blackened surface now winks back. Or: It is and always was a decision, and could be error). Yet the effect’s deliberate, not causal or dreamlike. It’s light on water. It’s like a balance, like an equipoise. And then, no, it’s not. A rippling lake surface, the water can’t conceive that it’s here or that I’m looking at it or that it has any connection with desertification, salinity, river silts. For all that, it has to be said that reality doesn’t arrive as a lake. It arrives as an angel knocking on the door, pointing out how many things make up a world. Waking up, what it pointed to was this drowned valley, the yellow-box, the ash, the calm night-covered hill, the weight of wind and water. The weight of design and engineering. What it lit up was a complex moment in perception where to conceive a dam’s bearing towards human nature requires the same skills as the resolution of any ethically knife-edge, historically many-sided issue. In our time, for example, some Israel, some country in the Middle East. It’s exactly at the point when I realise how each drop of water, hanging in these hills, is gathering to fruition that I realise, too, how far the night’s behind me and I’m fully awake.