Thinking of Darwin

Were it not for that photograph, disaster in its final stages, matchbox houses coming down, rubble of streets, uprooted trees, lives we somehow could not envision, removed from us and not our own, on distant coasts the fall of night, we might never have thought of Darwin, remembered what we had forgotten, nothing but desert at our backs, somewhere the light gone grey, gone green, the very texture of the air evoking strangeness in us, distance, deepwater harbor on the rim of an island whose aspirations, despite itself, assume proportions hemispheric, continental, set adrift in uncharted waters where a wind from the Timor Sea smacks of Celebes, of Java, celebrates archipelagoes for which no names have been devised, where rain runs green, and rocks dream gold, where every morning, on our tongues, we taste the raging of the dust gathering at abandoned stations and know, or come to know, the life, the littoral on which we wait, though not yet clearly its true name, not precisely its purpose with us; where, naked, night to night, inventing names for our nakedness, we lie suspended under the Equator between the wastes of self and weather, trying to learn ourselves, our names, what to make of this emptiness, this sense of absence which afflicts us, forgetting what we must remember, the great Australian coast spun out beyond our scrutiny in shales, corals, limestones, salt scrub, sand, discovery at every turn and, this far south, no turning back, latitudes of impossible dimensions bleaching the horizon, mapping what will not quite stay mapped, nothing but desert at our backs, nothing but darkness to advance on, night on the routes that enter strangeness more dangerously, in the evening, than we can bring ourselves to say, darkness and an interior for which, of course, there is no name except, unmapped, unknown, ourselves.