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.
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…
is because they yearn to go back
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