A strong easterly blows through ghostly
radishes: dried brittle, seed-pod spires,
menorahs in vast profusion, the unliving shell
encasing the deeply sleeping, the waiting.
Mail isn’t delivered this far out of town,
though trash is emptied, wheeled
forever down gravel roads, a low rumble
like a train fully loaded with grain—it takes
months to move it to the coast, out to sea.
Months have passed since the hurricane
tore New Orleans apart, a couple of weeks
since a cyclone ripped up northern Queensland.
Last week, a Category 5 hit the Pilbara Coast.
The winds picked up in Purgatorio,
the earthly paradise trembled and no one
ventured up there. Out back, John has been
breaking up the airframe of an old Cessna—
cutting through with hacksaw and welder,
shearing rivets which litter the ground
like eyes of seagulls peering up into the sun,
unblinking, out of their demography.
He took it platonically to the scrap-metal yard
this afternoon; the place depleted,
faint echo of depletions elsewhere
that melted down are recast, and rebuilt.
In some places they recycle cities, they’d learn
from mistakes, they’d list the lost on memorials.
Our three-year-old, citizen of many places,
tells us he is ordering his dreams for the night.
For him, sleep is building, rebuilding.
At sunset, the rivets shift focus, seagulls
flown back to the coast, small night birds
awakening, an implosive silver glint
as the last rays are broken, leaps
into the haze of memory: in Louisiana,
just after Katrina, I heard families
moving for shelter in anger, despair,
alone-ness, isolation, dismay, frustration—
nothing could be rebuilt in the same way.
I have been distressed by the unfathomable
death of a wattle tree, ground cracking
at the heart of an ant colony—
movement subterranean, even more
so than air, oceans: sweeping emergence,
seed pods split with the barometer;
the weight of a mouse crossing
a roof beam, bark clinging to a fence-rail,
a rivet missed in the clean-up—
these too are to be given: commonplace,
if secretive.