V
Now I will walk again into this field of wreckage

which is my starting place—On its stone heaps the tussock

is dry stalks the colour of a scratch in glass and rattling fennel

tendrils from the root—A single cloud

now coming in over the motorway on slow dissolves of light—

Along the cutting’s side speargrass with a rain wind in it

moves through the shape of a catching fire—This

stoppedness before rain in which years I have forgotten

invent a landscape still in what I have named landscape—

ruinable, incandescent, piece by piece drawn

into that blank in thought which sets the names

in their array—tussock, speargrass, wild fennel—bright charges

hung upon abyss—Do you remember?

In head-high grass, its pale seedheads, the wind is massing

light, lights moving in place and scattering down—

At the level of my eye the grass untidy, touchable, steeply

its slant stalks narrowing back into their likeness—

A train which even now is sending its long cry back

out of the vanishing point it keeps discovering from the scene—

The rain is first a prickling sound and then hand hair eyes all

touch and does not know me walled in itself, its dazzling blank—

The road will come through here—