Snow can’t have fallen.

There was a chessboard on a scintillating

bluff

          of stairwell

                             flesh—what-all he

up endued, or down, with pivots,

concretised. It smelt of old spit-

air let from a carnival mallet.
5 a.m. He’s in a bed, not at home.

Some dark smokes and peals.

Tell a story, says a boy’s voice. The boy is white-blonde, with an obdurate coldness

of finger. And tuck me

—sheet shrink-filming rib-

cage—so I can’t squirm at all.
A Blue Mountains hermit

                                    gazing at clear

                                                         still creek water counts

the pulse in his sallow jowls—one, three,

four, two, dawn fog, pulse, each a gecko

                                                                      darting. Creek-

smell the urine of one with thirst.

                               He sees that his clothes are rags now and draped over a nest

of spurred bones. Kookaburra lands on the whipper snipper cord

rack of the vision eating him.
Yarraville warehouse—studio

where in kinder times they shot

cars, also farming machinery. All-white,

LED, without squaring, diaphanous

tunnel to the ancients, star portal.

He paid the cover at a side entrance. Ate four googs.

Went out front some to breathe.

Snow can’t have fallen.
Meanwhile other isolates

                                      surfing coastal plains, Southern-

                                                                                      Cross-eyed in trim deserts,

ferreting honey ants from basin

                                                    alluvium, in hisses

through grassland winds, steamrolled

pennies of pink

                  salt and plateau blood

                                              —they are all eaten.

To some gnomic ends they feed themselves.

Your brain, the boy’s fire.
By white whizz-bang hushed

West Gate siren mast oil squat vistas

4 a.m.-bay-tinted

                          eyelets

                                  of cab glass black what-all

boy up whispered down down the Melbourne

side whispered man’s voice snow

can’t have fallen can’t have fallen tell me

driver is it very

                        anything where you’re from
Good sleep collects

                             in the bone. Salt

                                                       pent from creek water

drunk wishes rushes snowy. And Great Sandy

camels, they bear what little

                                                remains of the devoured

over a Europe of red dunes

south—to rhododendron gardens.

                                        There is a mass interment in the gardens. An obelisk

shrine erected. Into this bed we tuck our wild folk and their kin.

You who went without: sleep.