BESIDES GOOD AND EVIL

BESIDES GOOD AND EVIL

BESIDES GOOD AND EVIL

i.

Two days ago
you placed my hands in a pine field,
one dream beside the other

Where our lips, our broadening eyes
compost beneath a root of skin,
where our clothes fold up

Glow quietly through the earth
while the dry green field
we wake beside each morning

Falls dim with their memory.
Starlight absorbs into powder sky, clay
opens to cool like skulls

Blown into red flowers
on our shin blades, their spinnakers
driven into clouds, into rocks;

Flailing against the weight of your head
you rise &, like a Titan from sleep
doze still above your death,

Move forward into light
& stare undiminished from the window,
metropolitan furrows

Growing resinous
as hydrocarbon fall-out rouses
ex-nihilo flowers, spitfires

In the eucalypts’ trim. Such
coincidental similes forced gently
through cat shit





Thriving between
Newtown’s permaculture terraces
are most unlikely, being

All of earth & mortal nature
hung along a row of black clothes,
our bodies’ carbon silhouettes

Mud as dust in water.
You remember names for all the animals
& birds, sense balanced on line.


ii.

We speak about this later, garlic
mash and pomegranate
bled through the sinuous grain

Like hundreds of silver eyes
eaten crisp. This reminds me,
air had the scent of the visible

Day’s late sun, a faith
seed blown over Cow Hill
in a small eloquent gale

As a storm fell over the range
to our spines, blue
up against yellow grass ends

& grey tree cores rattling,
the blackberry flowers unheard but beginning
to witness the wind shake

Leaves from leaves, stones
from their buried life like feathers’
growing up





And away from the corn fields.
What was left to say, on the hill
nearer town

We found a few things
driven before us
whorled as the top of our heads

In a cold night wind
sparky with fire & thrash, our feet
wet & singing

The last, most beautiful return
as if it mattered.   Morning air is clearer then,
the kids we are becoming

Quiet as a babble
like music
in the garden, wind-chime

Nerves split adrift
over the back yard’s first light—
free intricacy

Lets the fields lift easily
my hand in yours, thistles
peeling into space.


iii.

Take, Scamander, My Virginity
as if a river’s name
its moisture amidst syllables

Is marrow for the soul,
our sheaf craft borne across water
like the lung’s chaff seed





Flown off a dark lock
toward sea, where the light foot hears
you, almost twice

The water, best thing being
the way it falls
out of things, or into things

Again, tree sap
blooming into stars like a body
half ‘man’ half ‘fish’

Hovering over the cold lake
high in the mountain
or alluvial, sifted & infinitely fine.

In water we
come back to real work, the what is to be done
only partly revealed.

Salt crests on the tiller,
nets cast wide & fretless there
as waves

Ride along the eye
of Horizon, a boat named sheerly
for departure

& reaching out
toward the sweep of a green round island,
land spit

We triangulate rain, dew
river and sea,
falcon brain adjusting air strata





& tension to water’s
layered resistance—to speed
this wandering measure

Live through all this
material happening swift & honest
about us.


iv.

Later we land on a copse of fire,
feet doubling ash
where rocks glow plasmic in the rushes

Gleaming gold
where the highway’s empty wagons
melt as they rise

Over us
&, drawn in a tongue of salt
wet flames from the head

Eat flames between arm
pits, knee-joints, eye-brows pelvic
from the soil’s

Slow heat.
Skin’s hallucinate indivision
its red & green

Windfall of hair
burnt as the five flames at the end
of each hand

Go out across the land,
begin anywhere
& return, coiled hot

As ash,
embers quincunx
over pines.

Eyes seek their acrostics,
taste buds
definitive as a nerve’s

Sweet accidents
in hard roots returned to gather
dry

nets of plants.
By the hill
my syntax glows,

the world
radiates
its steady amplitude

on & off,
burns more deeply
in its waste