there's something somehow intimate
about the act of writing:
I mean with paper and a pen,
alone, words circling the brain
and taking shape like little desert
caravans across the page,
strung out on the horizon
of each rigid line, not rigidly,
but shimmering like heat mirage
with visions of the inner eye...


Athens 1998

When milky fog hovers over the river,
I see autumn paddocks hallucinate ti-trees,
paperbarks steaming, a swamp wreathed in ether,
bovine forms moving more lightly than ruminants,
collar bells chinking reminders of substance
in a volatile, vapid world.

I walk to the river to listen to water,
a phantom poised on the dim pontoon
along with vague silhouettes of herons
hunkered down to watch eddies inbound
for quicksilver glimpsed
through shapeshifting mass,
that signifies fingerlings, morning's catch.

Walking past the building
where hurt animals are brought to heal,
between clouds' graphite masses
and storm-indigo of hills,
recalling hosts of sunflowers
once growing here to either side,
tall enough to beam down on my face
or even hide among,
I realise there's no other place
to call my home but in my skin,
whose pores, now sensing autumn rain,
prime themselves for change and chill;
and in my mind, where sunflowers
glow out of season and undimmed...

There are no adjectives for this:
a state beyond the epithet,
when at night
it tries to rain,
but there are only
semblances:
wind's passing breath,
the phantom drops
that stir the grass,
then silences.

I should replace
this meagre light
that fades
before it finds the page,
but there are no more
lines to add,
no words that burn
the tongue, the brain.
The pen has lost
the urge to fly.

There are no messages.