Though now as one, I still in part walk
opposites, crossing my own path, seeing
the same defoliated acacia from different angles.
Rain and heat—liquid fire—have brought
melons trailing out of the ground, spontaneous
and avid in their crab-like wandering.
On television they’re one step ahead:
Dow chemicals suggest the herbicide bullet
to fight such infestations: .45 revolver
‘fully loaded’, target layered over,
like the lens of a paraglider pilot’s digital camera.
To compel me on, circuiting firebreaks,
desiring steps that will guide me upwards,
bright eyes of your soul hidden behind a fog
of melancholy: a spitfire lifted off the verandah,
placed on saltbush at the base of a young olive tree,
a tuft of fur left from a moulting, like fibre
inside a grass tree, or the needling insides
of a zamia pod, glass splinters that make you
weep with itching, spitfire moving segmentally,
antennae bristling like an Ed Wood prop,
white-grey hairs monitoring its suctioned progress
along twig, head swivelling, mouthpiece ingesting,
collating, ants sensitive to its work-effort.
Black pollen dusts my feet. Flies stick in clusters
on my leeward side. Sheoaks, melaleucas, acacias,
eucalypts, planted anterior to the exterior
of firebreak, wild radishes with lobe-like petals
flowering early out of heat, lowering genetic
tactility, joke of light that hides a full regimen
of stars and cosmic bodies. Bees fast among white
and yellow varieties. Crows mass, a cappella.
Chips of milky-white quartz in brown semi-clay.
Jam tree skeletal, bark shedding like sloughed
gwarder skin, wood holed by borers singing
below audibility: tin whistle, baroque recorders
imported like black pollen, white fungus
prized by small ants demolishing the local,
moving through wells of interpolated rocks.