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