Talk

Kevin Brophy

When the dogs began to talk among themselves we thought (of course) that they were talking about us. In fact we were convinced that they were planning something against us: some form of revenge for imagined grievances, we thought. They will be vindictive and unreasonable, we thought. They snarl a lot, especially when we go near them trying to hear what they mutter to each other. We don’t understand anything they say anyway because suddenly they have their own language with its own nouns and verbs and modifiers and pronouns and idioms and proverbs and all the rest of the cloudy forms and colloquial usages that make up a language. How did that happen? Someone said that the trees have been talking to each other for hundreds of years, so this dog talk is no surprise. It was a surprise to me. Now, when we talk among ourselves I notice that the dogs look at us with suspicion and anger. It is as if we have suddenly learned to bark.

Kevin Brophy’s latest book is Look at the Lake (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018), a record of a year living in a remote Aboriginal community in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. Recent books include This Is What Gives Us Time (GloriaSMH, 2016) and Walking,: New and Selected Poems (John Leonard Press, 2013), shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for poetry. Kevin is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.