No walking ground the same
no matter what there’ll be
in adjustments.
This oven this earth as dust this water we watch vanish and ancient
is added to a list of household items swapped when worn out
for shoes that light-up walking the fence-lines, those boundaries.
The sharp-toothed dog on the hill is fenced-in. The echidna
in the rocks below sets out at dusk to roll across the hills basically
unchecked in its flightpath, but vulnerable to a leap of the fence, to tearing jaws.
Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes (he’s back now with a polished
and bolstered version in-hand), know the properties of papyrus
beyond its worth in song.
Which part of the night sky I see, you see; we share without having to cast
contrails as locks where we can’t go for all science’s wish-fulfilment
sacrificing to show what’s between thought bubbles.
The sun has been so bitter I doubt there’s anything narcotic
or even soporific left in dried cells’ thin walls of grass and wildflowers
to change desire lines of sheep, their groundart so resoundingly pragmatic.
It is difficult almost impossible to set a route through the haze
of bush-clearing dust or the abrasive pluming of a spark
as carbon-release, the emptying out of the sink.
The chilliest twenty-four hours were those of translation-loss
beneath a sun whose rays reached the earth so fast and so strong
they curled paper before you could sign off on the data.
625: Where the flock filed between manna wattle saplings you’d expect
big damage, but there was no ruse large or small, just a passage
away from the stranger.
The writing-surface was intended to decay and fragment in this way –
what you now read is what was intended to be read, what has gone was never
meant for your eyes at the time in these places.
The Extractor-in-Chief of iron-ore has a waterslide from the crown of his yacht
to the point just before breakers start to – later, scientists from his university
will haunt his sport, stare into oracular swirls of microplastics.
These inland thoughts
on a fiercely hot and dangerous day – exhausted
even before dawn fell.
Photograph © Brent Leimenstoll
