The only realism in art is of the imagination.

It is only thus that the work escapes

plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation.

	(William Carlos Williams)
 
I. Every convention is also a technique
 
1. sleepless thirty days:

place names loom up
and disappear. Apparitions

of grain bins erupting
in dull conflagration–

slaughter yards–the urine-
coloured eyes of dead

sheep leering from
irrigation ditches. We

slug it out on the roadside
for hours just to keep

the disagreement alive.
Each blow describes

the beginning of a story
told from its end: weighted

with its own nihilistic poetry.
 
2. sometimes drank until you were numb.

or sat there among sleepless
dust motes like a phoney buddha

high on ephedrine and mantra.
seeking direction from

x to y in the absence of any
recognisable landmark,

varying the dosage (degrees of relation
between what is and is not prescribed

according to the logic of adversity).
then turning north into sunsets

redolent with odalisque figures–
naked silos posed against fields

of yellow-flowered rape …
we are back were we began:

the flatness of a perspective scene
which recedes against

a merely conventional horizon,
Blaxland and Lawson-esque,

appearing inverted on the other side–
as if to rectify

a wrong way of seeing.
 
3. where to now? riding in

on the last breeze and hard up.
a hundred pages on

through plotless outcountry
we arrive again at the

flat edge of pacific breakers
in slow dissolve to urban

nostalgia, moral undertow
and nameless affect …

or backwashed in reverse cycle
as prodigal sons gone south

and no forwarding address.
We could've been the children

of Whitlam and Coca Cola,
jetlagged, having lost track of

history or currency denominations.
 
4. nothing to be gained here.

before, after. cash for scrap.
another 4:00 a.m. stupor

vomiting the dregs of last night's
mental arithmetic. dreams of a

recurring decimal
that stretches out cross-continent

without ever giving you a clue
to its reason for being there.

A punchline without a joke.
Dead-of-night towns on the

overland route. Miles gape,
evoke silent interlocutors

on the nod towards unfolding
catastrophe. A deus ex machina

lurches carbon-arced
out of bearing cases ground down

on the long haul from mount isa
to broken hill, dry-retched into

cataracts of bulldust. Spent fuel
lingering like cheap cloying perfume.

Cutting the black interstate line
to haul eastwards across

salt flats ridged by narrow
horizontal bands: on one side high

dunes littered with coarse vegetation
which when slightly decomposed

has a brown earthy appearance.
 
5. Daybreak under barbiturate cloud-

patterns. Ahead, the sky sends down
a dragline, describing a vertical front

ranged from on-high to the grey
volume of easterly pressure systems.

a mirror, held up to art: to reflect,
is not to change. traversing unfamiliar

regions of cross-sectional debris
our projections fly straight back at us–

bypassed on the long straight road,
thinking the scene ironic or insincere?

A procedure, to establish
first principles. Landscape with face

and hands turning on a dial.
an ambiguous terrain, its objectivity

is a thing of the mind, una cosa mentale.
 

 
II. A monument to something history plagiarised
 
‘dark revolving in silent activity.' Proximity

edges forward, an isolated and discarded

thing. strange shapes bred from this

forsaken wilderness–wheels of coal trains,

shunting of freight cars, loading the giant
conveyor belts. Long peninsulas jut against

sky blacked-out of nocturnal cartography,

awaiting castration. Rockdrill totems,

paleoflora. each stroke of the brush

of the hammer of the pen, to force the hand
against petrified inner space. Drastic

as the maternal body's death cycles and

purification. Hate becomes an efficient engine

scraping away at the coruscated vision,

made edgeless and in time the reasonable
ordination of events. Not to balk

from consigning what needs to scrap (‘ends

accomplished turn to means'). And with these

precautions, set out again westwards to

clear a path through the broken-headed tracts.

 

this obelisque erected in / macquarie

place / a.d. 1818 / to record that

all / public roads / leading

to the interior / of the colony / are

measured from it

 

 
III. The effect of travelling in distant places
 
1. Attention cones, outward from

light source and seasonal photographs
take motion in their grasp.

The prodigal's irrational return
through disorderly striations and

eerily neutral background noise:
the sound of an airport, of a

house collapsing, of a bridge
in rain. Perhaps some alien

brain there waiting to smother us.
Sunsets wrecking the blanked-

out cellophane happiness.
After the nightsea crossing–

retracing, step by un-
countable step, the sinewed track

(‘irruminated meat').
Autumn leaves and excrement,

like haunting reciprocations.
the sick man groans,

dragging his sack of instruments
on into the immeasurable–

beckoned by its fool's glimmer …
 
2. balshazzar's ghost, draining

into grey, too slow and too final,
and what's written there–

some strange irregularity of man
blazoned in the sky's zero.

the dance around the golden calf–
a common instinct towards religion

in monetaried vehemence.
in each outcrop, a hieroglyph

of dionysian ecstasy, sloughed off
from the eye that beholds it.

It's morbid death-watch begins.
perhaps we are waiting

to be told that man is not born free
or good, but is only the backwards

description of what he underestimates.
 
3. the eye, too, is a product

of history. Contemplating
desiccation and evitable

lines of regress, water to salt.
Clumps of skeleton weed

standing alone in the midst
of alchemical counter-proofs

miming ecology. The vast
signatura rerum crossed-out

by seams of alkaline.
A noise like machined-

grist hammering a borehole
and brackish effluent spat out.

What it feeds does not equal
that tract of uncultivated land,

sketched into the background
piero della francesca-like

as a scaffold on which
a foreground hangs. Being

so much dreck and signage.
 
4. dry wind undresses ground

naked under heat-tremor.
Buckled sheets of plate glass.

Irregular emissions fill the air,
mimeographed in reflex cutaneously

programmed. A very present
physics of the senses stripped-out

of genital wilderness, lymphatics
and distort-teratology. The end-stop

lying there and coming apart
into a gap that knowingly desires us.

As red ground, cut across with blue
in post-ketamine let-down, emanates

from cracks in the opaque residue.
 

 
IV. reprise
 
not at all as you had pictured it–

out on the broken edge
‘liquid mountains float in the air' …

outcropping from thorn bush,
slates of bloodstone placed there

according to the laws of chance–
the idea, the motive, immured in its

vault like a fossil awaiting excavation.
We reached the next turning point

and came to a standstill:
from centre dead up against periphery

(no things but in relations). The old
illusion of inward left bare

in the first false dawn. A bridge to the
promised land in perpetual

strip-tease slung above the 100,000
expiring light bulbs of luna p rk.

Undressing the blacked-out scar of
decommissioned navy yards, dry

docks … Our hungers for elsewhere
were free to enlarge, conscripted

to the Big Idea–not by ballot but by
lottery–free too from the necessity

to prove anything. In the shadow
of America everything was neon,

sex and no come-down.
A plush hollywood blonde

all glass and electric switches
radiating from a single point

like a finial on a skyscraper.
It rises up from the compendium

that constitutes its centre:
an ever-exploding movement

watched over again on replay
and then reversed, jump-cutting

at zero altitude from interchange to
nightroads across flat out-country …

Difficul to remember the
purpose and reason for continuing.

Already, apparitions of distance
reveal the end of the line–

vertical and pin-point luminous
as conducting rods and storm fronts

ranging west to east.
the rainslashed glare of

articulated lorries as unreal
as visitants from outer worlds.

Earth tremor and juggernaut
cut sideways in the wake and counting

back to the moment the halo formed
around the analogue dial,

wandjina-like, and electric as
spirit medium shot at high speed.

Thinking to out-run the dry
resounding emptiness head-on.

Escape was a sad parody of a film
that's been running for a century.

blue shadows flicker across
defaced warning signs–a surface

of night stretched thin across
unbidden secrets of dead lake beds,

diesel and methedrine. Or two
exxed-out roadmaps overlapping

in the rearview, testing the stringency
of what it means to be invisible–

though drawing no conclusion from it.