A smouldering grid on a cypress stand
The local cakeshops were not ethnic enough for us
A smouldering grid on a cypress stand
Well, why leave it there? I say, let’s go the whole hog
Now with all seasons damaged under our savage dominion
She has signed the forms in her diffident hand
In the morning, I went out with the officials.
Here's how I first saw it.
A sort of colonisation took place here
Dropping jokes like shelled nuts along a path
A busload of adolescents and bureaucrats trade frisbees
Canberrans congregate in all seasons but especially this one
The abbot’s insistent: so much to do before
Unfazed by the coast road, we welcomed the challenge.
From the yard’s galvanised subconscious, I watch
Because it was wet and neither of us felt like working
Not that hard to remember, or even to place
The paddocks present blind flanks to the sun
Only a currawong dialing the neighbourhood
Your grandfather steps lightly over the cold kitchen floor
It begins with an aleph, the diminutive
There should be a name for the special case
I had forgotten rain’s mechanism: how it doesn’t fall
The car’s dorsal wave carves off
The picture shows a man leaping from a second-floor window.
As if to evoke the artifice of location
of its bearing on the land
Can we not take all these prizes as given?
As always, time’s sieve selects a myth from the facts
The line between white sky and white sea is smeared
How well I know that photograph from childhood’s mantelpiece
As if you had never known this light: saints, tunics
Our sun-cankered, frost-lacerated old bomb
Some took with them amulets, propped parasols, jade slaves,
‘Forgive me, sister, if my handwriting seems
Look at these hands: how scarred they are, how ugly.
Did it (as she reported in that flap of a note
Cloudshadow snags tussocks and scree
I know that there will be a night when we
After the clamour of choosing a captain
Bowler-hatted, unsmiling, moustachioed,
How you dazzled us, old chum, with the colour of that tree!
So there we were, jammed together/
on the back seat,
As if all the world’s ravelled, bright course
At first you hardly recognise them for what they are
In the warm dusk, pink and purple arcs
A filament lights a dark bulb of shops
Heat arrives from over the Brindabellas
Tonight, America, the stars above you have been blotted out
is because they yearn to go back
They are the harbingers of hard times for a business…
To be quiet and not crush
That you were conceived before the Afterwards of uncommon times
A roof away
Oh, but it’s a race all right, trust me, kid, that
Vessels shaped by the light they hold