Robert Adamson - Creon's Dream lyrics

The old hull's spine shoots out of the mud-flat, a black crooked finger pointing back to the house. On the dead low the smell of the mangroves. The river seeps through the window, the books are opened out on the desk. When the first breeze hits the curtain the cats scatter. It could be dawn for all I know, concentration wanders through Creon's words to Antigone Go to the dead and love them – okay so they live as long as I do – what else can I make of it? The bright feathers from a crimson rosella lie in clumps on the floor with a pair of broken wings. In the dark I try to write and remember the zoo I played in as a child. There was a balding sedated lion and a wedge-tailed eagle hunched on a dead tree in a cage; they threw it rabbits in 1953. The whooping cranes side- stepped the concrete ponds and whooped all night. The blue heron flaps across the river in my head, poddy mullet hanging from its tight beak. Ah, dead fish, the old black crow, the sick pelican. I pad the room, out there mangroves are pumping up the putrid air, life goes on. At the zoo they still throw the animals dead meat, the big cats are bred in labs where they lock the albino freaks away. I pace the kitchen: where are the books, who reads the poems? I take a drink, ribbonfish swim across my pages, I shake my head but they swim on – in low flocks, chromium ribbons, they fly under the river herding up the poddy mullet, rippling the surface, as the tawny frogmouth knows. The books have gone, the spoonbills wade in with whitebait skipping ahead of them, channel-billed cuckoo come swooping after the crows, flying low over the water, calling their mates, dipping their hooked beaks into the moving chrome. I sleep in broken snatches and dream nothing. Mosquitoes s** at my cheeks and empty bottles clutter the verandah, the books are in darkness but the sandy whimbrels finger the pages, words dissolve, waves of the dead arrive in dreams. Out there the black finger points to the mouth of the river, where the dead are heading, they move over the window gla**. The extinct fins move the fingers of my grandfather, mending nets, the dead friends sing from invisible books. The heron picks the blood-shot eye from my father's terrible work in the kilns and darkness is complete.