It’s not right to be awake late at night, here:

there’s secret business down in the gully

between the darkness and the trees
and it must be obeyed. So I wait until

the morning’s walk to bear news of our liaison

to the discerning ferns. My skin carries 
your heat. The daring stringybarks shed

their robes, and discard them in heaps

at their feet. They step lithely down to the creek,
dip their toes in the cool dark water.

(Sometimes we find they have died in the night,

and fallen headlong into it.) And today,
the thick old chopping block is shredded

to rags.  I stand on the deck and watch clouds

whip themselves black, and you speak me
that impossible verse, twisting your hat

to a furball in your nervousness. Nobody

intervenes. But night falls again on Blackheath.
So we follow the law of the storm

the way the beasts keep each other warm.