1
Giidany Miirlarl often lifts Black-shouldered Kites,
today something other, a Nankeen Kestrel landing
drawing attention to a bay-horse back, immediately
retreating to its holding pattern like a child’s kite.
The belly shivers from tens of thousands wriggling fry,
our tongues taste a sense of hope, counting life as success.
An octopus uncoils dark, leathery arms and pulls itself
forward, a sensual motion, intelligence sheathing each limb.
The camouflaged cephalopod stops to play dead or alive.
No butterflyfish, no wrasse, no colour installed today.
A fish floats in a sea of small fishes, white as a ghost,
eye glazed as if life is an anomaly. What have I done?
The fishing fleet is assembled in the marina.
Solitary Islands squat on the horizon. I have not been.
I wrote the Cabinet Minute initiating the State’s
first marine parks here and in Jervis Bay.
The politics infuriating, Fisheries recalcitrant and ignorant,
my ambition continually pruned until less than a page.
I prepared a draft NSW Biodiversity Strategy with a colleague,
a substantial document. A government change to the right
tossed our work into the wastepaper basket. And now?
Biodiversity in the State is in steep decline.
Nearly 1,000 species risk extinction and remaining habitats
are able to support just 30% of original capacity.
2
The headaches, left eye closing, retinas on different
wavelengths, my doctor thinks a brain tumour possible.
I photograph the machine that will look inside my skull,
beautifully designed, sterile white as clean of course.
The Siemens SOMATOM X.cite a premium single-source CT scanner
maximizes diagnostic precision while improving patient comfort.
Utilises the high-power Vectron X-ray tube and StellarInfinity detector,
which were previously reserved for high-end dual-source systems.
The machine rotates around my head. I lie quiet and still
as a dead mouse as it slices the meat of my brain.
Computers stitch the images together to make a 3D map,
a magic trick first performed just over 50 years ago.
I will never be able to make a confession with authority
and can’t think of any secrets I wish to share with you.
The young radiographer returns, puzzled at first
when I ask if she found any trace of a prefrontal cortex.
History is ridiculously consistent, its future unfair.
What would a cost-benefit analysis reveal in Sudan?
A new Siemens SOMATOM X.cite Computed Tomography (CT) scanner
typically costs well over a million dollars, and depends on all the extras.
5,000 years ago, physicians tried to treat sore heads,
violence from any weapon to hand caused so many wounds.
Case 6: A gaping wound in the head, fracture of the skull and opening of the meninges.
This case describes the folds in the brain as ‘like those corrugations which form molten copper.’
Case 6: An ailment not to be treated.
My case number?
The world was always violent, is it tipping over?
My life is exceptional for its apparent innocence. Luck?
42 years ago: Nothing was your own except
the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
Human history has been authoritarian, and little progress
with all the mistakes we make with language?
Would you question the wonder of hieroglyphics,
the healing power of spells, materials with prayer.
Note.
Case 6: The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, circa 1,700 BCE, is based on much older texts and considered the first extant medical document. It is possible that the papyrus was written by the great Egyptian physician Imhotep, high priest of the sun god Ra at Heliopolis. https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/papy.html
