The sun scorches my shadow

as I walk the quarry’s ochre tracks

with the banker’s wife Jasmina.
It’s the turn of a long, slow year.

I’m barely twenty, holed up

in a country house trying to write.
Our daily walks are a mirage

in that summer’s blaze

of dust and heartache.
We make a strange pair —

her silken hair and cotton dresses,

my shaved skull and honey limbs.
Sipping coffee thick as river silt,

we speak of her homeland,

of lost things, chimeras, dreams.
In my cups, she finds a wolf moon,

a burning orchard, a muddy child.

In her own, a mass grave.
Hollyhocks frame the cottage where

the banker unbuttons her pearly dress

and grips her on the flyblown bed.
Eyes lost in a sea of wheat,

she smiles in slow-motion, like when

she unlatched that box of ashes.
At night, a ute screeches burnt rubber

circles around the pub carpark.

Grain in the silo shifts and spills.
I scrape resin from a pipe,

smoke — my mind, blown glass

in a moon-washed field.
Rippling in its cracked bowl,

the silver milk of time slips,

slips away. Remember,
a woman named Jasmina

and I strolled through the mine

and over those treeless hills.