(for david egan)
1. after months at sea re-

hearsing the property rites / a shotgun

barrel like a dark

clockface surrounded by vegetation

                        & laughed silently

the time of appeasement has

            passed–bulletholes & bridal

            gowns

                         after the silent advocacy

was spent under vows working a borehole

line by scant line.       a too-severe

symmetry of design / forecasting the

                         long dry season

                         & no truant memory

            as seeds of dolomite

                                      sewn into the

black stream irrigating a dust-

worn image of the one-who-owns & the

one-who-must-be-obeyed
2. maddened by the flat outlands thirsty for

altitude & spirit-levels / the

            thorn bursts into rain darkening

teeth in bloodsweat weather
northwest from kamilaroi country

to port-of-bourke

                         a string of muddy

waterholes gateway to the

nevernever compass-dark & needle-eyed
the hugely mortal beast

                        sleeps under

                        petrified scales–

                        its dream

                        swarms

                        over the plains

                        salt nebula

                        burning the scrub

                        night-pale
3. breakneck after the fall

gutting the run-through

cattle grid & cyclone wire–late warning
across three “states”
the stormeye gathers

red soil

old-testament-like

into its ferment–tearing up the

paralytic lakebeds

in a cumulus of bloodlust
& the fire wrapping the air about it into a

whirlwind

thick with crazed insects
4. dunes of rusted steel in full glare of the sun beating

on the old dry wrecks behind the viaduct

broken by seas of emptiness

                         blood-alcohol & flocks of white

sulphur-crested cockatoos

screeching at sunset out along kaputa road

grey-red from scrub fires

a hundred kilometres away

                         artifice & truth melt

into one another in a vista that

dies out between pine trees as night & the access road

descend. though “nothing will have been proved”

                        we are digging a hole

into which all the arrangements can be

upended & buried

facing the dark parentheses

after the words are spent–as though the gesture itself

were an ultimatum