LIGHTNING RECEPTIVE IN THE WET SEASON

The smooth pale hand of lightning shuddered through the clouds. Was it trying to give me some signal from itself or merely pleading;

I am lightning, oh god,

I am the shuddering trembling sheets of lightning: ‘It’s okay to be what you are,’ I said.

The electrical current came jolting through the brain of the sky, the sheet white light darkening the green open hand of sand palm, lighting its blackness up;

[ a giddy spider / dazed ].

Such lightning all the way from the Equatorial hot belt of the planet couldn’t help but be itself.

Throughout the day it had backed-up sweltering above the mangroves, stickying the atmosphere from here to the Annaburroo Billabong, where the pale lotus lilies rolled around their droplets.

The sky shuddered the way my heart did, when I saw you looking at me.

At first my eyes were serious with hard acting, but too quickly fell into romantic love’s sugary depth.

[This would never happen out along a beach in a landscape].

I was here to relearn love’s first lesson. You asked, ‘that look you just gave me, do you really mean it?’

I guess I did in spite of myself, although you didn’t deserve it,

but what the heck.

I’m making no apologies for my ability at tenderness, or even the absence of it,

or even the disappointing lack of rain, or the fact that lust joins hands with death and including but not ending with,

the dreadful almost maddening weakness of the shuddering lightning.

All night it tries to tuck us in but perpetually withdraws the sheet.

I turned to him, ‘you can love me if you want to, it’s really up to you.’ My thoughts turned rocky like the beach.

I was heading out of the Darwin harbour,

a lapwing intent upon its dreaming.

In the end he didn’t love anything,

…and I flew away to be with the crowd of flying foxes, common little ferals just back from Jabiluka,

gripping to palms with clean moist claws and stinking up the place with their swabbing brown eyes and bandy brown-winged legs.

A lone fox flew amongst the palms. ‘Go and find the others,’ I said.

‘If this night wont wrap its arms around you, find safety in numbers, regenerate, be fruitful.’

Christmas beetles shudder metallic gold and flee the branches.

Mosquitoes roaring upon the night, singing blood before the sun has set.

The lightning chains are connecting the hands of the big clouds.

It’s jagged string around their flat white palms and billowing knuckles.

…All the sleazy month I’ve been out in my car, cruising for the viscious chains, but it turns out to be another false alarm…

Instead flat white sheets with the flicker of an orgasm.

The old beach casuarinas and pandanus begin to shake and

sway on the edge of the dunes,

go on, go on, go on.

The black cockatoos long cries into the building thunderheads south of the equator, tell of a strange land.

The clouds spend all afternoon building up into opaline structures.

I’m flapping my arms under their breeze, the cockatoos cries have given

me wing.

The sheets are lifting, parting the clouds like flickering hands.

Go on, go on, go on, bring you energy to the waiting land,

that is still now in anticipation of the big wet rain.

The monsoon is solid curtains of water, blanketing the rapid creek.

Crocodiles moving into the tide to feed are still and relaxed,

a sea snake spirals to great depths.

The whole town is torrential. Before rain the land has gone as far into the earth as it can get, into its flat dry hope, more receptive up north in the month of October. It is so needy that it aches with its lips parched dry. It has no shame in its need to be fulfilled.

Movement occurs in the big leaves with the first few drops.

The spiders slip through and enter houses for the night. The mangroves oily heads open and begin to seed along the beach where the tide comes in, thunder washes up its back. The ocean further out is jamming with light and sound. Tonight I walk my dogs in the big storm.

Frogs are shouting the wet wet, the wet wet, the wet wet. It’s opaline.

Coral Hull is an Australian writer. The work represented most recently in Ascent is from her current work in the outback. For more of her work and her mission take a look at her magazine, Thylazine.

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Email: Coral Hull

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