Walking late by a roadside bramble
Hoops of brittle thorn, a caul of dead grass, quiet rust
Frost-burnt une feuille serrate
Motes fall and swirl as brassy notes and cobwebs
Tangle straw stems in mossy dirt, the gravel wash
A stripped page of newspaper rotting, crushed
Polyethylene terephthalate
Half-full of piss or rain water, the sign of a dog
Chalk eroded in the furrow of a wheel
Gone a little wide on the corner, or a near miss
Now overgrown in parochial paspalum, afternoon light
Cold and real, bees somewhere in the shadows
A thought of honey in the thicket
The grey common behind a wire fence half down in the damp
Bruise hung on the smoke
Of a sundog burnt in hazy sky, translucent
Sleep stuck in the cavernous dawn of a bramble there by the roadside
Where I hurry into the emaciated past
Where dry straw recedes speechless into the middle distance
A skein of mist settling over a paddock
Air still, damp, muddy in my nose as the scent of blood
Steel cold hockey bone blue, knee high
Twigs and the hair on my skin lift in the golden aperture
Of the sky’s milk crystal
Fanned behind a brittle stand of eight grey poplars
Pines melting in the middle distance
Dark green glass shards sliding into the earth
A path trodden flakes of rock
Through clumps and bristles of grass and wet-stemmed seed-heads
Dropping over bright plastic bits and rusting caps
Squashed with dirt into a bleak loam
A field scattered with the bones of my predecessors
Wandering aimlessly over turquoise hills, smoky dead trees
I find I’m outside the future, overgrown
Great walls of roots & earth crumbling sodden in the muddy weather
Wooden claws of hackberry gum
Knotted foetal in the grey wind, contrail chords in the sky
Lines unfurling between hard matter and blue
Blown above a jetliner’s silver precipice
Disappearing into the end of a broken branch
Time and space are orange as mud in gravel
Trees a-glint with a wild fire
Sparks flying across the horizon the singular grey abyss
Every bramble has been the same, I think
As they all rush from my past like black swans, snow geese
Drawn into the circle of gravel
A formation of birds dropping suddenly into mind
As I walk around, feathers widening
Angular as they land into the poverty of the world
The horizon always looking, then retreating from the present
And all it holds, the skeletal frame of a sparrow chick
Its absent eye resting on a quartz pebble
Left as a sign to the logic of inhuman death, clear, immensely old
A grain of cold stone, the indifferent raw tangle
In a bracken fern halo, the silent forehead of a sickle moon
Tacked strangely to a wooden light-pole
The sound of water tinkling and gurgling, treble & bass
A silver banner fluttering and wending
Through the poplars and brace of pines
Darkness somehow equal to its bright and random melody
Caught in the cold pomegranate at the road’s end
Crimson flesh held in a world of white foam
Mist correlates, transpires, solid shapes beneath the moon
& stars, hips and haws, love and hate
No matter how opaque and powerless I become
I still cry into the night as it springs burning into felony
Emptiness glowing through dry yellow stalks
No match for the whorl at the crown of your head
Telescoped to a galaxy, a whale from the old world bare
As a chunky key-ring nob lost in the mossy grit
Where I walk & look, no doubt within
Perhaps hell-bent as gravel paths spread from me chaotically
All the same, having wandered here before
And knowing how each will always yield its own
I fall away into the roadside ditch
Sticks and mud stuck in my hair, the back of my throat
Catching the gold sunset
Behind, of course, bitumen spread Bauhaus thin and black
A wall of glass windows over the road
A mercury pool shimmering in the wind
The whole reflected world shuddering.