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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.

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

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

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

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

As if you had never known this light: saints, tunics

‘Forgive me, sister, if my handwriting seems

Our sun-cankered, frost-lacerated old bomb

Look at these hands: how scarred they are, how ugly.

How well I know that photograph from childhood’s mantelpiece

Cloudshadow snags tussocks and scree

Did it (as she reported in that flap of a note

After the clamour of choosing a captain

How you dazzled us, old chum, with the colour of that tree!

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

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

Oh, but it’s a race all right, trust me, kid, that

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