We no longer go out to paint,

unless the object to be represented is such that it cannot be transported.

– Lang Shi Ning (Giuseppe Castiglione, Qing Dynasty court painter)
The fly-screen door has only just banged shut

& already the hills have scraped themselves bare

of spotted gums & blackbutts. What’s left?

Mainly pasture, gleaming green with summer rain;

some granite extrusions & fencing.

It’s an alternative version of Australia,

glimpsed through the lacquered lattice work

of this ‘Pavilion for viewing hobby farms’.
From the pavilion, designed in a tin-shed vernacular,

our sight lines stitch the view together

though livestock, crammed into a semi-trailer

blurring up the highway, might disagree

with their knife-edged human narrative.
Shadows cast by the corrugated awning

lengthen, shorten, then lengthen again.

Sunday fairs come & go: fruit preserves

& 70s bric-à-brac change hands;

the salt-crusted Alvey fishing reel, unwanted

on its trestle table, is a container of dawns

spent casting out from waves’ edge.
If idylls have a conclusion, I am yet

to find a happy one. In the distance

a walking trail bifurcates the mountain side

into twin histories, both deformed like a prediction

that unpicks itself one brick at a time.
We count the threaded ways in which

to immortalise the scene:

that chestnut mare, will it be recalled

in heroic oils & low-slung light or perhaps

the framework of a Chinese technique –

the grass as negative space upon which float

the black-ink strokes of eucalypts?
Whoever owns the postcard I sent you

from a country that one day will cease to exist

seems irrelevant. With the flick of a scholar’s sleeve,

the squeeze of a trigger, we picture

the dragon-spined rock shelf from which

I slip underwater into turquoise light, towards

sea urchins; the dreams of abalone & bream.