Movers and Shakers

By | 1 August 2015

Immersed in the ruin made of our yard by the digger, I tried to pick
porcelain, rooted pug, glass from a slurry that accumulated
around the smashed ends of the drain. The whole thing
a disaster
parched, slimy, I raked about in the muck with both shovels:
the sharp, prodding one; the more hard-working, loping one. A fine Bruce

of a tool, something to hide oneself inside the scene with.
The sheen of sliced earth was an eye on me. I clapped it with Bruce,

jabbed it with the prodder, picked out its woken edges, irate jags

poking from the strata, and was in awe at this blind horizon,
a dead sun of sand over the dirt, far-off, ancient teacups
sailing heavy under the lips of the earth. There might have been
an imprint of held-down faces,
some exhibition of the trials
conducted on the headland: the fossil ashes of community
singing by a fire. Shades of composition devolved, assumed

insignificance in the trench, that boneyard, that riding sea.

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