I hardly know where to begin, Dave. This is raw and beautiful, heartfelt and painful. I am in awe at how you put it out into the world. I want to return to this as inspiration - the departure heartbreaking but life-giving. Thr memory of the spinifex will stay with me for a long time.
Hi mate. Ahhhhhhh........ I was in a dozen different minds about whether to publish it, and if so what to say about it. You know how it is. The big things in life seem too huge to summarise, but the detail would only distract from the message anyway. In the end, as I said in my intro, it's a common enough story - but I am very glad that yourself and others found it meaningful. We have all had run ins with the madness of love, and and life is full of both joy and grief.....
I have never experienced spinifex barbs up close and personal. But I have experienced wounds and wounding in ways that require the long extraction process you refer to, friend. The contour of that high point you climbed...the colors and the contour are haunting. It seems almost inviting. Like one long continuous ridge. Although I imagine, with not track, it is quite the challenge. You are a dashing pirate aboard the cairn at the top. As to love lost and love won and moving on...ho hum. Imagining a world without you and Meg together seems not very realistic to me who has just come to know you here in the latter days. So changes had to be made and recovered from. We get no sympathy from nature for those transitions.
Ah yes! No sympathy from Nature, though I do find it helps me to heal.
We do all end up with arrow points embedded deep. It's the price you pay for living.
Glad you liked the photos. I don't have a proper photo of Urlatherrke/Mt Zeil. The long ridge line was from another walk - but I think the very distant peak open the far horizon, a bit left of centre, could be Urlatherrke.
The summit photo is definitely from that mountain, on that day. I remember picking around with the camera trying to balance it on a rock and set the self timer. I took other photos of the view, and I'm sure I took some on the ascent, but I have no idea where they are. I've just been looking online. There is still no track, but it seems that the mountain is now a reserve and National Parks have established a road in close to the North side and a camping area, and it gets climbed more often. Back in 1997 I drove in down old faint cattle station tracks that didn't look like they had seen a vehicle in a long time. Ascents were rare because of the access issues, and the lack of info.
You poem, Dave, is absolutely terrific. I cannot tell you how impressed I am by the way you have combined the story of marriage breakup, new love, the pain of having to leave Alice Springs and the reappearing wounds from spinifex. I guess I see this poem in much the same way that you saw your trip to summit of Urlatherrke when seeking perspective on it all -- it's a work that takes you way above all the storms of your own life. Well done, my friend!
Sincere thanks, friend Martin, for your very generous comment - and for the restack. I have spent the last few days excavating old photographs and notebooks - an archeological dig into my own life. The floor is still covered with it all. I wrote the poem long ago, soon after the events described, and revisiting it now has been a necessary step in reconciling my old work with my new. We are what we were, plus what we have learned since. Life is a work in progress, until it isn't.
I think Meg is serious about getting us to Cork, before the year is out. Since our visit in 2019 the landscape of Ireland has haunted me too, so there will be Poetry to write and questions to ask. I'm a good listener, and I'm betting you are a good talker, as well as a wonderful Poet. I look forward to raising a glass together.
I only saw this reply now, Dave. So sorry for not responding sooner. We certainly will raise a glass together if you do make it this way. And please tell Meg I was asking for her.
David, I loved reading this. Especially the part about the grass needling into you, how you allowed it to needle into you and come out later. It's a wonderful metaphor. And Laura ingalls wilders Little House books. There's mention of something called Spanish needled grass that does the same thing. Only can cause horrible damage and even death to livestock. I'll have to look up and see if they're related in some way.
Hi Rebecca. I'm delighted that you liked Spinifex. I agonised over posting this, and what to say about it. Like all life shaking experiences, the full story is complex and impossible to tell, and I can only give one side of it.
I have not heard of Spanish Needle Grass.... Spinifex is a ubiquitous feature of Central Australian deserts, and beautifully adapted to the environment. In turn, the animals and insects are adapted to it, and live in a complex balance, mediated by the traditional land management practices of the Aboriginal peoples, who for tens of thousands of years have actively managed the landscape through the careful use of fire, ensuring a mix of thick full grown vegetation, which provides shelter for many of the marsupials and reptiles, with areas of recent burn, and areas of regrowth with green shoots, which provide feed for grazing creatures such as the kangaroos. I have travelled cross country through remote desert, with my Warlpiri friends and guides gleefully torching the place every few kilometres. Rather unnerving - because mature spinifex - with its thin spiny resinous leaves - burns instantly and fiercely and with a hot desert wind the flames just race along. However, my friends know what they know, and we stayed safe, and walking back over the burnt ground they found sand goanna holes exposed by the burn so - with a bit of digging, we had dinner!!
So evocative of a place I have never visited, and the raw emotions you experienced depicted honestly, bravely and beautifully - I’m glad the intriguing title drew me in to read
Thankyou Laura. I'm glad you found it, and enjoyed the reading. Substack is a giant lucky dip.... like life. Sometimes we find something unexpected, that we were not looking for...
Wonderful story, David. It made me wonder about love of all different kinds, of the landscape, of a town, region, people and bravery in following your heart.
Mmmm... there are so many shades and subjects of love, but to me there always seems a common thread. There must be - for most humans to find meaning and shared experience in evocations of love. Is it just how our minds are wired? Is it just an artefact of evolution and natural selection? Or is there something much deeper than that....
Hi friend Maddie. Ahhh yes... Central Australia is a long way from beautiful Norfolk. I have wonderful memories of visiting Kings Lynn to see Castle Rising....
I'm glad you liked Spinifex. I thought long and hard before putting it on Substack, but everything has a place...
Thankyou, friend Rebecca. The sequel work - Half-Life - is the end of that story, although the fact that I found love again is, perhaps, the true ending, and a beginning....
Metaphors, mountains left climbed behind. Spinifex scratches , search a way out and erupt on their own. Dealt the cards you play the game. Win or lose, you tied up loose ends to give life another chance. Family, friends and poetry are the keys to play like connect the landscape body dots. Seen from above a map to where you go or have been. Spinifx the tale that wraps around your journey. Enjoy your writing.
Hi Richard. Yes.... I think that about sums it up. Poets see metaphors and meaning in everything; patterns too. As I said in my introduction - it's a common story really, but in an uncommon place. Places and events become inextricably linked...
Once again DK you bared your soul. This latest effort explains a lot about the very different young man whom I met so many years ago now. He was so out of his comfort zone and his happy place in that office. But a very different story now 🥰
I walked into that office 5 days after climbing the mountain. I was play acting. Every time I closed my eyes I was seeing cliffs of sun shattered orange quartzite and tussocks of spinifex.
Sometimes, I still do.
But I made a new life, and found a new chance at happiness, and here by the river together is very very good....
"You can wear thick long pants and gaiters over your lower legs or - like the Aboriginal traditional owners, and like me - you just accept that pain is part of living; something you endure, and feel, and consider, and then move beyond.
But later, long after the red welts have healed - you find that your body has adjusted, and learned, and the spinifex spines start to resurface, like buried memories, one by one, by one…"
Stunning.
The heartbreak, the sadness, the joy, the love. It's so sweeping.
I am wondering, though, whether you committed an act of profound emotional self harm. Self-harm carries unconsciousness of the cost of the act, not being able to look as one acts. You looked. You felt. Your leaving Alice Springs seems to me, then, an act of truly profound love--a love big enough to feel the immense pain of leaving...and still know itself as love.
I can see the poetry in going to Tjoritja: a place ancient and vast enough to know itself, with authority, as love.
The likening of memories to barbs that had been lodged in, only to find their way out away sometime later... - I really felt that, especially when a regretful or sad memories resurfaces every now and then...
Yes - I hope the older work is meaningful for people. I have certainly had some wonderful comment.
It also causes me to self reflect, and it helps me join my old work with my new/current writing. For far far too long I have felt like I have two lives - back then and now - which is an illusion. We are - all of us - the product of all our past experiences, all our past and current loves.... I see that in your own writing!
Popping back to comment, as I didn't have time when I first read the other day.
I really appreciated your commentary about how the poem came about. Any mention of Alice Springs reminds me of when I read (and re-read) Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice, when I was a teenager. I hadn't heard of Tjoritja or the Spinifex that grows there. Really fascinating, rugged and beautiful. And the needles that eventually resurface after walking through it are such a good reference point for what you were going through at the time.
Hi Wendy. Thankyou. I'm so glad that Spinifex had meaning for you. The lands around Alice are remarkably beautiful..... Some of my other desert poetry lives on my Substack site too. Kaltukatjara, for example https://davidkirkby.substack.com/p/kaltukatjara?r=471m47
Thanks for the pointer, David. That’s another beautiful poem (and wonderfully evocative photographs, too, which bring home the sheer expanse of Australia). I’ll explore more of your poetry.
This is amazing work David, thank you so much for sharing it. The honesty in the words make it a beautiful thing that I can not only enjoy but also learn from. I so hope Substack remains the place where this kind of work can thrive. All the best to you, D.
Thanks Dave. I deeply deeply appreciate your comment. I too hope Substack survives. Finding Substack convinced me to start publishing my work again, after a very long silence. Not sure what I would do if it folded, or got bought out buy Musk or Zuckerberg...
I hardly know where to begin, Dave. This is raw and beautiful, heartfelt and painful. I am in awe at how you put it out into the world. I want to return to this as inspiration - the departure heartbreaking but life-giving. Thr memory of the spinifex will stay with me for a long time.
Hi mate. Ahhhhhhh........ I was in a dozen different minds about whether to publish it, and if so what to say about it. You know how it is. The big things in life seem too huge to summarise, but the detail would only distract from the message anyway. In the end, as I said in my intro, it's a common enough story - but I am very glad that yourself and others found it meaningful. We have all had run ins with the madness of love, and and life is full of both joy and grief.....
Best Wishes - Dave
I have never experienced spinifex barbs up close and personal. But I have experienced wounds and wounding in ways that require the long extraction process you refer to, friend. The contour of that high point you climbed...the colors and the contour are haunting. It seems almost inviting. Like one long continuous ridge. Although I imagine, with not track, it is quite the challenge. You are a dashing pirate aboard the cairn at the top. As to love lost and love won and moving on...ho hum. Imagining a world without you and Meg together seems not very realistic to me who has just come to know you here in the latter days. So changes had to be made and recovered from. We get no sympathy from nature for those transitions.
Ah yes! No sympathy from Nature, though I do find it helps me to heal.
We do all end up with arrow points embedded deep. It's the price you pay for living.
Glad you liked the photos. I don't have a proper photo of Urlatherrke/Mt Zeil. The long ridge line was from another walk - but I think the very distant peak open the far horizon, a bit left of centre, could be Urlatherrke.
The summit photo is definitely from that mountain, on that day. I remember picking around with the camera trying to balance it on a rock and set the self timer. I took other photos of the view, and I'm sure I took some on the ascent, but I have no idea where they are. I've just been looking online. There is still no track, but it seems that the mountain is now a reserve and National Parks have established a road in close to the North side and a camping area, and it gets climbed more often. Back in 1997 I drove in down old faint cattle station tracks that didn't look like they had seen a vehicle in a long time. Ascents were rare because of the access issues, and the lack of info.
A lot off the photos online are NOT of the right mountain. However, this photo online is definitely the real thing: https://www.flickr.com/photos/schillers_shots/8202948764
You poem, Dave, is absolutely terrific. I cannot tell you how impressed I am by the way you have combined the story of marriage breakup, new love, the pain of having to leave Alice Springs and the reappearing wounds from spinifex. I guess I see this poem in much the same way that you saw your trip to summit of Urlatherrke when seeking perspective on it all -- it's a work that takes you way above all the storms of your own life. Well done, my friend!
Sincere thanks, friend Martin, for your very generous comment - and for the restack. I have spent the last few days excavating old photographs and notebooks - an archeological dig into my own life. The floor is still covered with it all. I wrote the poem long ago, soon after the events described, and revisiting it now has been a necessary step in reconciling my old work with my new. We are what we were, plus what we have learned since. Life is a work in progress, until it isn't.
I think Meg is serious about getting us to Cork, before the year is out. Since our visit in 2019 the landscape of Ireland has haunted me too, so there will be Poetry to write and questions to ask. I'm a good listener, and I'm betting you are a good talker, as well as a wonderful Poet. I look forward to raising a glass together.
Best Wishes - Dave and M :)
I only saw this reply now, Dave. So sorry for not responding sooner. We certainly will raise a glass together if you do make it this way. And please tell Meg I was asking for her.
David, I loved reading this. Especially the part about the grass needling into you, how you allowed it to needle into you and come out later. It's a wonderful metaphor. And Laura ingalls wilders Little House books. There's mention of something called Spanish needled grass that does the same thing. Only can cause horrible damage and even death to livestock. I'll have to look up and see if they're related in some way.
Hi Rebecca. I'm delighted that you liked Spinifex. I agonised over posting this, and what to say about it. Like all life shaking experiences, the full story is complex and impossible to tell, and I can only give one side of it.
I have not heard of Spanish Needle Grass.... Spinifex is a ubiquitous feature of Central Australian deserts, and beautifully adapted to the environment. In turn, the animals and insects are adapted to it, and live in a complex balance, mediated by the traditional land management practices of the Aboriginal peoples, who for tens of thousands of years have actively managed the landscape through the careful use of fire, ensuring a mix of thick full grown vegetation, which provides shelter for many of the marsupials and reptiles, with areas of recent burn, and areas of regrowth with green shoots, which provide feed for grazing creatures such as the kangaroos. I have travelled cross country through remote desert, with my Warlpiri friends and guides gleefully torching the place every few kilometres. Rather unnerving - because mature spinifex - with its thin spiny resinous leaves - burns instantly and fiercely and with a hot desert wind the flames just race along. However, my friends know what they know, and we stayed safe, and walking back over the burnt ground they found sand goanna holes exposed by the burn so - with a bit of digging, we had dinner!!
Yum!
Dave :)
So evocative of a place I have never visited, and the raw emotions you experienced depicted honestly, bravely and beautifully - I’m glad the intriguing title drew me in to read
Thankyou Laura. I'm glad you found it, and enjoyed the reading. Substack is a giant lucky dip.... like life. Sometimes we find something unexpected, that we were not looking for...
Best Wishes from Australia - Dave
Wonderful story, David. It made me wonder about love of all different kinds, of the landscape, of a town, region, people and bravery in following your heart.
Mmmm... there are so many shades and subjects of love, but to me there always seems a common thread. There must be - for most humans to find meaning and shared experience in evocations of love. Is it just how our minds are wired? Is it just an artefact of evolution and natural selection? Or is there something much deeper than that....
D :)
This will colour my day. As I go about the lanes of Norfolk, UK, part of my brain will be in Australia, feeling your pain of departure.
Hi friend Maddie. Ahhh yes... Central Australia is a long way from beautiful Norfolk. I have wonderful memories of visiting Kings Lynn to see Castle Rising....
I'm glad you liked Spinifex. I thought long and hard before putting it on Substack, but everything has a place...
Best Wishes - Dave
Ah! Gosh! Dave what an incredible poem this is. The last stanza took my breath away. I will be reading this many more times.
Thankyou, friend Rebecca. The sequel work - Half-Life - is the end of that story, although the fact that I found love again is, perhaps, the true ending, and a beginning....
Metaphors, mountains left climbed behind. Spinifex scratches , search a way out and erupt on their own. Dealt the cards you play the game. Win or lose, you tied up loose ends to give life another chance. Family, friends and poetry are the keys to play like connect the landscape body dots. Seen from above a map to where you go or have been. Spinifx the tale that wraps around your journey. Enjoy your writing.
Hi Richard. Yes.... I think that about sums it up. Poets see metaphors and meaning in everything; patterns too. As I said in my introduction - it's a common story really, but in an uncommon place. Places and events become inextricably linked...
I'm glad you liked it!
Best Wishes - Dave :)
Once again DK you bared your soul. This latest effort explains a lot about the very different young man whom I met so many years ago now. He was so out of his comfort zone and his happy place in that office. But a very different story now 🥰
Ahhh, dear Cheryl...
I walked into that office 5 days after climbing the mountain. I was play acting. Every time I closed my eyes I was seeing cliffs of sun shattered orange quartzite and tussocks of spinifex.
Sometimes, I still do.
But I made a new life, and found a new chance at happiness, and here by the river together is very very good....
See you in March!
Love from us
D
"You can wear thick long pants and gaiters over your lower legs or - like the Aboriginal traditional owners, and like me - you just accept that pain is part of living; something you endure, and feel, and consider, and then move beyond.
But later, long after the red welts have healed - you find that your body has adjusted, and learned, and the spinifex spines start to resurface, like buried memories, one by one, by one…"
Stunning.
The heartbreak, the sadness, the joy, the love. It's so sweeping.
I am wondering, though, whether you committed an act of profound emotional self harm. Self-harm carries unconsciousness of the cost of the act, not being able to look as one acts. You looked. You felt. Your leaving Alice Springs seems to me, then, an act of truly profound love--a love big enough to feel the immense pain of leaving...and still know itself as love.
I can see the poetry in going to Tjoritja: a place ancient and vast enough to know itself, with authority, as love.
Oooh... friend Leslie.... that is a beautiful and insightful view.
I knew it was a necessary thing to do. Also, the hardest thing to do. And yes, I hope, also the most loving thing to do.
In the end, new life did grow from those ashes.
Thankyou
Dave
The likening of memories to barbs that had been lodged in, only to find their way out away sometime later... - I really felt that, especially when a regretful or sad memories resurfaces every now and then...
I enjoyed this piece a lot! 😊
Thankyou, E.H
Everyone's individual griefs and joys are unique, but the experience of having them is universal.... so I'm truly glad my work made sense to you...
Memory is what makes us who we are.
Best Wishes - Dave
I like why you’re writing old and new. Really enjoyed this poem especially the last
-working their way out years later,
reminding you of the too bright air
and the blue blue sky
on the day they needled in-
Really powerful.
Thankyou!!
Yes - I hope the older work is meaningful for people. I have certainly had some wonderful comment.
It also causes me to self reflect, and it helps me join my old work with my new/current writing. For far far too long I have felt like I have two lives - back then and now - which is an illusion. We are - all of us - the product of all our past experiences, all our past and current loves.... I see that in your own writing!
D :)
Yes, your work resonates in that way, thank you.
Popping back to comment, as I didn't have time when I first read the other day.
I really appreciated your commentary about how the poem came about. Any mention of Alice Springs reminds me of when I read (and re-read) Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice, when I was a teenager. I hadn't heard of Tjoritja or the Spinifex that grows there. Really fascinating, rugged and beautiful. And the needles that eventually resurface after walking through it are such a good reference point for what you were going through at the time.
Hi Wendy. Thankyou. I'm so glad that Spinifex had meaning for you. The lands around Alice are remarkably beautiful..... Some of my other desert poetry lives on my Substack site too. Kaltukatjara, for example https://davidkirkby.substack.com/p/kaltukatjara?r=471m47
D :)
Thanks for the pointer, David. That’s another beautiful poem (and wonderfully evocative photographs, too, which bring home the sheer expanse of Australia). I’ll explore more of your poetry.
Again, I love spending time with your writing, Dave. With your poetry, self-study and honesty too. Thank you 🙏
Hi Ronnie..... Thankyou, my friend. I hope your weekend is creative and peaceful....
Best Wishes - Dave :)
This is amazing work David, thank you so much for sharing it. The honesty in the words make it a beautiful thing that I can not only enjoy but also learn from. I so hope Substack remains the place where this kind of work can thrive. All the best to you, D.
Thanks Dave. I deeply deeply appreciate your comment. I too hope Substack survives. Finding Substack convinced me to start publishing my work again, after a very long silence. Not sure what I would do if it folded, or got bought out buy Musk or Zuckerberg...
Cheers
Dave :)