An ugly gentleman, six-and-a-half

feet tall, combs his black hair across one ear,

and then another. Mallee gums eavesdrop

the space where the magpies

dig for paddle pops and ants, and he sees himself

face down beneath the bench and rising,

then face down trickling down the river

until the affirmative disappearance. An Australian problem,

that is why one moves to England impulsively

at a bushfire juncture and searches for jacarandas.

Then, a swindler in a brown jacket, flinging manila folders

of old manuscripts in defiance. An early bank manager,

round over the crotch, wearing the stolen beard of Gaudi.

Abroad, he carries his hands

in his pockets because that is what his

mother had told him to stop. On the streets of

Melbourne, no one has ever seen his hands,

but in the company of the ugly gent we get his

right hand drawing the abstract symbols of

an oratory, but in farce, like a kyōgen, revealed

in reflections of bleached teeth. They

are specialists falling ill at Yarra Bend,

a conversation point for crows, later for the

kookaburras to mishandle.

The oldest country in the world does terrible mathematics

in a blue notebook using data drawn by the triangulation

of any number of the lighthouses countries away that keep

shining their sea lanterns onto the bodies of one another.

It leaves the draught of a cruelly interrogative map,

part-indictment, part-holiday brochure. Brown jacket falls to his

knees, begging for a constitutional library in British English.

Black hair, itinerant as usual, leaves a philosopher baby to trail

behind, to catch up, to always be a little too far off,

producing a vaseline-fogged Polaroid in which he reveals his ankles.

Blisters, signs of life. Inflamed like a plum pickle. The redness

of an outer-suburban encroachment. No hope

for the pale shallows of the Yarra Bend.

Residents have been kind enough to build their

fourth wall out of double glazing so that we

see them for what they are, but do not have to hear them.

Or is it that they too want to participate in the great

lighthouse triangulation? Impetuous geysers turn mud into

pits, and the pits soon enough erode away, dropping

all extraneous earth, leaving cones. Once

absolute openings have birthed at the

surface it takes but one idea for them to shine a

light to warn all the travellers of the earth of coastlines

between. But it is an indecipherable message,

openings close too quickly on the birth of say, Australia,

leaving foreign speakers of the same language to name soughing

bogs ignorant of them. It was a great winter, says black

hair playing with the white hair of his mother’s

corpse in the deepening Yarra with his legs in the murk,

a toe twirling the seaweed filaments. The same dandelions

as home you have crushed, shouts the man in the brown jacket.

But he is a stupid young swindler, burning manuscripts

and starting fires of summaries, declaring a

neutrality of violence wringing the neck of a black swan.

No more stupid than you, calls out the overhearing brown

jacket, the committer of grievous bodily harm

for the satisfaction of a grandfather’s grudge. All of your

bird calls are European war songs or heraldic threnes. Skinny

in a fat land, resembling only its wiriest trees.

A bushfire is important for the

active pollination of gum trees.

Under black crusts sprout bolls of swamp wattle, drooping dianella,

and families of timid geraniums looking about an opened

canopy. Floundering can look like drowning sometimes. A

storm far off swells the Yarra and strengthens its undertow.