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The Mouth

uploaded: Sun, Aug 26, 2012 @ 1:14 PM last modified: Sun, Aug 26, 2012 @ 1:17 PM (add)

by	robwalkerpoet
Featuring	Sunbyrn
length	5:05
Recommends	Recommends (9)

words:
This one was written after walking to the mouth of the Murray (Australia’s longest river) during our long drought.
music:
I’m just mad about the complexities afforded by 6/8. Couldn’t go past Sunbyrn’s Slither Away without putting my own stamp on it! Of course I had to add a bit of shakuhachi. Thanks Sunbyrn for a very professional production.

The Mouth

From the barrages we pad the dunes crunch underfoot cockles on ancient middens
through teatree towards a distant roar. rollers dumping and foaming. salt spray soft-focussing the scene so only the centre where you stand is sharp, the edges shrouded.
A permapine line of pickets stakes a fort to keep the 4wds beyond the pale.

A world of white and shades of grey on this overcast day Walk towards the River Murray Mouth and see no one else in three hours, swallowed as sandgrains in the vastness.
Beached sandcrabs, chalk bone of cuttlefish soaked in its own ink, kelp, oystershells worn to blackness and flat smooth palmsized stones for skimming all in muted monochrome

Then the detritus of colour.
Shreds of polyrope in fluoro orange, blue, green. A manmade gaudiness of excess. Lids from shampoo bottles, a rubber ball, trash from passing ships. The disposable.
Always the rumbling roar of wind and sea.

towards the Mouth, the wasteland. A string of orange pennants to mark soft edges. Expanse of sameness. A desert of bulldozed sand, homogenous, devoid of weed, pebbles, shells, ripples. Spinifex flashing curved needles of light in the wind The great black serpent of the dredge pipe snaking over the dunes

The pipesnake shudders and heaves, throbs and pulses Press an ear to the peristalsis
and it whispers the word
silk
as black sludge passes through itself.

At the end the snake regurgitates black bilge and spews it swirling to the southern ocean, eroding away the last dune
The new Mouth of the mighty Murray renamed
Discharge Location A

First published in Australia’s NEW ENGLAND REVIEW
(Issue 21, 11/03/05). Later appeared in my micromacro collection in 2006.