Windborne Avenue

1

There are moths that cross a continent to die in this city.

As black cutworms they suckle Queensland’s

saplings but by spring

the heat is already too much and they make the difficult passage, flying

by night on an inner compass that draws them

here—a place where nothing is too much, where

shunting down the slender reaches of William Hovel Drive

I forget that I’m alive. A city is

a claustrophobic way to be alone.

Some afternoons I feel the whole city on heat—

the pent-up quarter-ache

in Barranugli’s confinements. Though I

love the smell of water simmering in the evening

in a hose left out on the lawn.

2

I want to feel the wind on my back

now that I’m back in the peloton trying

to write to the click-a-clack of my spokes to find a meter—any—

on the boulevard of this city windborne

with thighs around me pumping like pistons.

When the frost first lifts from the sprigs

the moths arrive. More than once

through ventilation shafts they’ve entered

the galleries of parliament—a dissenting

mob demanding only a place to breath in a building

far too much like a flag

piercing the hill’s rump at the moment of annexation.

Like that they were embalmed

and the house closed two days for renovation.

3

Between your breasts I rest my head

when the black hair of the afternoon malts in ashen clumps

from five-hundred insolvent

wishes for some modest certainties. From here

I see the gradient of a mountain

baptised with a slur

for the remnants of another people

who dwelt there in the circuit of their own certainties

for durations that can only seem now dreamlike in their expanse—

here they gathered to eat moths that chose this place

to die. Let me be like them—these moths—these dizzy

vagrants, churning through the elements on wings

of paper, so fixed on their final coupling

they cannot eat.

Louis Klee