Bungle Bungles, Purnululu National Park

The machine shows no reluctance to delicately lift and float,

Da Vinci’s imagination wavers a metre or two off the ground

then shifts fast as a dragonfly and with that insect’s precision.

The engine is muffled in the headphones transmitting the pilot’s

radio traffic, loud and invasive, when it could be poetry or music

working with these amazing striped domes, overall theme red.

The whole plateau reveals its pinnacles, soft sculptures softened

by distance on the scale of the sublime, hard to make sense of

except as beauty, beautiful patterns not needing music.

We bank, without doors, close to white sandy tracks the rivers

leave behind. I see a yin/yang pool, curving sand and water, try

to think Deep Time but there are too many gaps, abstractions.