1.
What does he think of Australia?
Too new.
He doesn’t want to say Australia seems shallow.
But our country, he thinks, has more water, thus more species.
He’s unknowable, like every other person.
But here in Australia they seem to think he’s basically cheerful,
always ready to engage in badinage with his mates.
Just when he feels nowhere on earth will surprise him
there are the marsupials! There are the bottle trees!
2.
A meal happens, and then another.
A wave passes, and then a million others.
Beyond the railings of the ship not even a sea bird.
How deep is the abyss right here?
We have a lady lecturing on the stars.
We have an ever-growing bingo prize.
We have a million bottles of wine.
3.
His boredom isn’t a cloud
since it’s the whole sky.
Sometimes he tells his boredom that it’s like the misery
that one day, with little prelude, brings on a revolution.
Soon, like a passenger disembarking from an enormous ship
he steps out of his boredom,
the boredom he’s eaten, and slept, and woken, and slept in
that breathes the way he imagines his mother once breathed
as he floated within her with very little stimulus and no volition––
and the world with its triumphs and annoyances
returns like the wind
and his boredom,
his boredom evaporates, since who can remember boredom?
No, that’s not true. He’ll still remember it.
Like the nausea that causes us to avoid certain tasks forever.
Not like pain. That can easily be forgotten.