Poems by Catherine Noske
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‘Walking the Bibbulmun’ 3.3.2 (23) (Walking the Bibbulmun Track) How do you map that point when only one more, one more step to feel you’ve walked beyond the reaches of ownership? This not yours, and no sign to know those marks tracked like concrete in the mud which might belong to yesterday or to aeons look at a scratch on one arm and think (hope) that it might scar, so as to claim yourself a possession of that inflicting branch and some minute particle changed, altered in your presence. Your ears will turn to catch a scrap of voice, thread-worn and born of the little wind, none are in sight. You lose the path, flagged along Allen Rd. by a man in a ute one arm out the open window, a chainsaw and a jerry in the tray, climb a hill you needn’t have to look back down his dust. The markers turn their faces from you. Trace steps back, jump a ditch to find them and follow, chastised until they relent offer you the stream, the boulders, clear water. Eat chocolate, perch on warm rock, wash your hands and face. Minutes later, five runners like an apparition, in silence. ‘Walking the Bibbulmun’ 6.9.6 (37) (Reaching Mt Dale) Summiting: we are jubilant, a champagne moment light like bubbles, the golden hour conspiring with giddy fatigue. Ignore the hitch-hiking, your manifestation as our rescue, our lift home, ignore that you drove us this last stretch. A summit marks the closure, traversal complete. We paused 600 metres back and failed to light a fire for tea – not a moment for hot drinks, apparently. But now we toast the horizon with the yellow powerade you brought, worried for our hydration. The silliness makes us smile, before, looking out, it dissolves just as quickly into something that gasp of waking in the night, or coming down. We can know nothing of this at all. We might tally kilometres, count each day, but it is synthetic, no measure. No measure could be made. Even the sublime is a narrative. What could we imagine of this? Complicit, every step, lines on paper working to sustain us – borders, paths, policies, law all bent to our being in this place. Look back. Notice absence in cooling air, mark the blurring line of track, receding in the dusk. Every and every step, breathless. What are we to this? And it is beautiful, beautiful. |
Catherine Noske is a lecturer in Creative Writing and editor of Westerly Magazine at the University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on contemporary Australian writing of place, with a particular interest in white Australian positionality and transnational structures of place-making. As a postgraduate, she was awarded the A.D. Hope Prize for work in this area. Alongside editing Westerly, she has been a judge for the ALS Gold Medal, the WA Premier’s Book Prize and the TAG Hungerford Prize. She is a board member for writingWA and A Maze of Story. She has twice been awarded the Elyne Mitchell Prize for Rural Women Writers, has received a Varuna fellowship and was shortlisted for the 2015 Dorothy Hewett Award. Most recently, she was second in the Margaret River Press Short Story Competition. Her writing has been published in literary magazines and scholarly journals both in Australia and internationally. Her first novel is forthcoming with Picador.
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