Willo Drummond is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Macquarie University. Recently migrated from the wilds of the NSW Blue Mountains to the shores of Sydney’s Parramatta River, she has weathered previous lives as an actor, singer-songwriter and arts administrator. In 2012 she served on the assessment panel for the Varuna Publisher Fellowships and last year completed a Master of Research thesis examining the ethics of the lyric mode in Australian ecopoetics. Propagules for Drift and Dispersal formed part of this work. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Cordite, Meniscus and The Quarry.
Cooing to R.A
Mr A, mangrove man
Mallarmé of the mud flats
I’ve taken you in to the jelly
of my brain,1 in a kind
of mud-dove dreaming
You’ll fly with me forever
now, we’ve simply no choice
in the matter. Once mud gets in
to mood and memory, life
becomes mangrove in a minor key
Swamp dweller, fisherman
I see you in the eye
of a Bush Stone Curlew; hear you
singing for your love; feel you slip
through the gap
in a waterfall of words,
rooting out
a manhole of meaning
You, of the in-between
place; you, of the feathered
imagination; you, who wrote
yourself into existence, one bird
at a time; I row with you, now, gently, along
the mangrove mile
I dream with you
under moonlight
Fish scales glint
in the tangle of your hair, and
on the breeze, I detect a hint
of ‘no referent’
under moonlight
It comes and goes with the tide
1 “I sing softly/ from the jelly of the stone curlew’s brain”: Robert Adamson, “The Stone Curlew”