Hungry in the dry bite of dust,
green summer—unique—that will
yield no grain, no second season
to fill the year against inevitable drought,
humidity, sweat we don’t drink,
running to the black flowering
of our steps in old blood dirt,
galahs hyperventilating up high where
termites have yet to reach, eating
out dead and rotten wood
as we talk through it, quickening
our pace along the gravel driveway
to escape the heat, slowing in shadows
of acacias where the dead bunch together,
cool you with their anxiety, so close
with the living and surrounded
by a heat that thins blood and soul,
wolf spiders in their lubricated tunnels
engineered like heart valves, dipping
deep down when we pass, front legs
hesitating then catching up down,
gneissic rock and Archaen granite
worked around where roots coil and curl
like church bells ringing out, marsupial
tracks half left where soft sift has impressed
and stone resisted, partially formed signatures,
imprimaturs of hope and claw, draggings
of the tail where cats thin out their ranks,
or solitary perambulations; we move quick
again across from a compact mass of shadow,
a lead weight jarred from balancing a wheel,
a brace of double gees traipsed from edges
into the pathway to slow our progress;
the trailer, loaded with dross from the shed,
will return to the dump what came from the dump:
that priceless hand-cranked telephone set
from the old Greenhills Pub, ripped out
during renovations: a charge that’ll make you jump,
wooden box like a casket, handpiece moulded
to fit all carousers, lonely hearts, aggro
husbands ringing home to say, ‘Don’t wait up, Meg!’
So much wire stretched throughout the district,
charging armatures from core to jolt the air,
parrots stunned as flying fish float to a surface,
alternating with currents of gossip:
‘The other newspaper is closing down,
they’re going to build an abattoir out there,
she left town because of shock, trauma.’