Dan Guenther: Looking for Uncle Max, Northern Queensland, 2012

Looking for Uncle Max, Northern Queensland, 2012

To the locals he was an oddity

who had served in Papua,

and given to a periodic melancholy

that took him to faraway places

beyond his family’s reach.

You arrived at his remote shack

to hear voices back among the trees,

near an ancient Holden left to decay

under a stand

of fragrant, lemon-scented ironbarks.

Some thought it was a matter of the heart

that brought him north to Queensland,

along with the cousins you had yet to meet,

the ones concealed in the lush undergrowth

who might have answered your many questions.

Up in the shadows among the aromatic leaves

the whine of two cicadas called

for a rendezvous of their kind,

as if wired

to some alien collective mind.

Max stayed hidden, and you waited for a time,

finally turning down the muddy track alone,

a line of waterfowl passing by high overhead,

on their way toward distant ranging hills

not unlike those found

along the Kokoda Trail.

Dan Guenther