Truth-and-Darkness                                                            Page 45

The way this short poem is written is as if the language disappears in its own

words. The words vanish from the page and the reader is left in a ghostly

space, in the Ring. "...the rider's heart halts." This is more than missing a

beat. Everything stops. Time itself is arrested, leaving only a "trace", some

'forgotten dream" that haunts the place and "fastens in the blood the ancient

curse/ the fear as old as Cain" - the fear arising from having killed one's own    

flesh and blood. The whole tragic story is carried in the blood and inscribed in

the surrounding bush forever. "The trace is never healed, but it is 'fulfilled by

remaining open, by pronouncing non-closure.' ...the trace marks the place

where identity and difference, presence and absence, constantly cross." ⁵³

Something of the sense of presence in absence of the original people of

Australia came to Judith Wright through an experience her grandfather had and

which she preserved in "At Cooloolah" (C.P. p.140):

Riding at noon and ninety years ago,

my grandfather was beckoned by a ghost -

a black accoutred warrior armed for fighting,

who sank into bare plain, as now into time past.

And walking on clean sand among the prints

of bird and animal, I am challenged by a driftwood spear

thrust from the water; and, like my grandfather,

must quiet a heart accused by its own fear..

"Identity and difference, presence and absence constantly cross." The ghost

continues to beckon and is related to the accused heart and the cursed blood:

The non-exclusive texture of the trace overturns the dualism and

subverts the oppositions in which the notion of the subject traditionally

has been inscribed... the "self" is primordially relational.⁵⁴

⁵³ Taylor, Erring, pp. 155 & 50

⁵⁴ Taylor, Erring, p. 138