Green Mountain (Fiji)

after Brett Whiteley’s The Green Mountain (Fiji) (1969)

The skyward pitch of the hill in its green glory
rising heavy and indolent as the knee of a woman
sunbathing in a sarong,
and the thigh that leads from this knee,
an emerald downswelling syncline,
end where the womb’s elastic triangle,
fronded and flowering, holds three
imperfectly white eggs,
expectant, fragile yet unbreakable
among a tumble of mellifluous treasures –
swollen sacs, pouches and bulges:
a ballooning Polynesian breast,
a giant scrotum of jackfruit,
an intestinal serpent –
all weighted with sunlight,
contented in their curvature
and insinuating themselves into paradise;
above this tumescent anatomy,
sent up from the nest like a dear wish
and stalled, a tracer hummingbird
peers down at the path she has taken,
as if to memorise its precise arc.
She will dart out and return
to warm her eggs again and again
or whirr away over the flank of Green Mountain
and be gone
at the bidding of the mind’s eye.

Louise Oxley