The dead are necessary they are forked like
branches they have their own names call them:
they are not hiding what use will you come to ?
a eucalypt stag a roost, a burrow, a rooting-place
great grey bones and a shiver of weed ants
will forage in your shoes shaken out
they will come back and back
I went
to the mountain she gave me three no-things:
a eucalypt sprig just born but fallen, pink-twigged,
sprouting little poked-tongue buds of acid-yellow
a tiny stop-motion spider teleporting from one dead leaf
to another all the brown sickle shapes maps
of the same country the wind of the turning year
that sky-deep irresistible shove
I went
to the mountain showed her my bare feet
my no-feet tucked under too long on the blanket
waxy, cracked like pale stone, weathered, split,
cross-hatched dusty with dead cells she laid claim
rising I turned back a prickling of blood ants
warring between pink-twigged tarsal bones
this gait, this no-gait jittering, contingent a shiver of weed
a eucalypt fallen a claim a forked question of use
Melinda Smith is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Goodbye, Cruel (Pitt St Poetry, 2017) and Listen, bitch (Recent Work Press, 2019). She won the 2014 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call and her work has been widely anthologised and translated. She is based in the Australian Capital Territory and is a former poetry editor of the Canberra Times.