Cowaramup is a small farming and tourist community in the Margaret River wine region of South-West Western Australia. My visit long ago remains an unsettling memory of alienation.

 

Moon Pool

The blue-black raven night

draws opal-scented folds

from quicksilver sparkle, scattered

like smashed glass over meeting grounds.

 

So it is, at this paddock fence

beside the scoop of an earthen dam,

while the westwind makes a nonesense

of the placid pearls reflected there,

 

on grey Cowaramup pastures. Thin grasses

flung exhausted around bare oases

comfort pallid voyagers not at all

in the colourless heft of this waiting land,

 

as low, fast potato-clouds

march inexplicably north-east:

cloud-streets lie across an unpainted sky,

randomly snuffling at the raffling moon-track.

We walk in the slanted, bruised night air.

 

Chris Hubbard

Cowaramup, WA

1998