What would have been

the poem for you 
has become an

over-riding sense 
of the day – taking it

for granted, as one does, 
with its drives, its houses,

its office – all the 
non-specifics by which

looking back, a 
huge sun-lit series

of changing moods
like grooved flat space

becomes a bare plain,
a wide riverless upland

under a lowering sky
which might be precipitation

threatened or passing over
or a storm building its

folding and unfolding
cabbage-leaves flung into

measureless altitude
in some dream

mountains. Cabbage, that is,
and acanthus. And

the mountains? Are they 
mountains? Yes, the ones there….

The ones which ripple up
confused with cloudbands,

bulging across the skyline
like wadding or

insulation bats coming 
loose in a roof. The

mountains are 
both barrier and

points of escape, whether
going into them or over them,

offering their sublimes of
amethyst depth (sunset)

and exhilarating breath-
inhaling sunrise

salutations of
viewpoints (views where

we linger as if first light
will never shift, as if the

aquarium of specimens 
will never empty, the ground

never be fully
exposed); or they’re

the promise of a
country farther on, which

must be better, more
riverine, calm beyond

words or exclamation – 
a “sea-change” valley

where black swans float 
like silhouettes on

permanent silver water
overhung by paperbarks

whose boughs are 
mirrored in shallow

translucences while
across the fence ginger-

toned cattle trundle 
through deep grass, plantain,

burdock and reed clumps,
leaving overhead

a few inland pelicans
to anchor their

beaks and gullets
way across in the blue. Having

crossed the mountains,
there it is – beyond thought

and desire. That said, 
this is a day brimmed

with both those things –
impulses, wordless concepts –

too many thoughts to think
and aching desire and not just

mountains, frustrations, 
plangent memory: all the

elements of the everyday 
mind. I know no

moment free of them 
once I have left

rare meditational calm
which is a brief, settled

state (how to stay there?)
even though, when in it,

I can hardly get up
to open or close a window

or switch on a fan and
it renders boiling an

egg an impossibility.
2
Your poem is no egg.

Perhaps, though, it is
a smidgen or diminishing

imperceptible degree
closer to one than

any act of language
which somehow must

carry unbearably complex 
feelings, intangible

depths of response and
an agreed way to think

and behave —
all out of order with

the intrinsic simplicity
(yes, I’m talking about

love again – really, yes – )
which shines through

every moment of 
reflection on loss or joy.

Perhaps, rather, on their
memory where it would

be good to get the connector
between them: there would be

no drift, there would be
certainty in the system

and an adequate balance
of information: night-fall,

bird-twitter ceasing, the
rise of cicadas and frogs

like a border or fringe
holding an instant darker

world together, neither sad
nor ecstatic. Did the egg

hatch just now?  did
ancientness and its im-

measurable swathe of time
allow the instant to drift

apart like the continents
are said to have done,

trapping each of us 
in a few molecules swept

nowhere in surf, glitter, dust? 
Good to be at one with them,

to bless them and be blessed.
3
I work all day and in

the night – at last it’s come,
cooler, not too heavy, almost

free of worry – I stay up to
add some words about the

stillnesss of a down-hanging
branch of flowering

lemon-scented gum –
it dangles over the

back verandah
beckoning gliders and

possums to their mutual
love of mouth and blossom,

nectar and shoot, their
leap, screech, squeal –

a pure ease with vacancy
out there beyond the

tree’s glimmering net.
Across the gorge a shooting-

star goes down behind 
the mostly patchy range whose

fires were months ago:
the star glitters a second,

two seconds, being debris
or satellite or some meteoric

flotsam, through leaves
and powdery flowers

outlined looming in the dark.
Alone, the poem’s climbed that

rock-strewn, twig-charred slope 
finding its well-watered land.  It’s

for the future. It feels.