still hour of witches and moonlight
moving stealthily through the forests black patches. Stork,
calm as a weathervane (a model) presides over maize and barley
crops, that brighten through weeks of high summer, stretch tight
as a canvas to the nearby farms, and further still, to centuries
old, grassy marshlands from which the stork feeds its nestlings.

Unmanned

Take this day, lonely as a man in
an empty house, at his window, the wintry yard
below.

Sea calm. The moon scatters its
coinage. A rubber dinghy bucks an orectic
surf. Pebble beach. The conning-tower signals:

which came first, meaning or memory?

One flashlight winks hungrily under seacliffs,
and then the flare. This setting becomes
an habitual space, chosen era for commando or
smuggler.

We make our choice, learn that grief comes
regular as sunset.

The bow-wave
turned in chrome coils as the coastline dropped
from view.

Once in a metal-etched hour, people
ran away to America to buildings the colour of
gun-metal, to a sidewalk venting steam
about the ankles of sable-stockinged girls.

How many of us cannot begin the adventure of the
day upon its arrival? The ablutions of the night done
with, the half-bad dreams wiped away, the tensions
of the muscles adjusted in preparation for the

perpendicular, the carpet rolled back, the masks
hung up once more upon the wall at the ready. Each
waking is a starting out from the old country.

The responsibility
of light beckons, unclothes the familiar objects and not
so familiar ones.

Lightning leaves the expression surprised
and the lone tree in the paddock startled with
cinematic glare, unharmed and lovely.

In a homely way,
the headlights sweep the back yard hovering over the
roped-swing in the pelting rain and neighbourhood
of cat & dog. This tells you that the family

is in deep trouble to be called into account in
afteryears while the shutters slap wettish to little
effect.

Shaped as an emu neck, steam extends
over the factory stack from the industrial sector
in this small, southern city. A yellow band
of horizon suggests sunset. The steam dissolves out.

Now runs at 4:15 the see-through veins of rain from
window to sill. A splashed up forest of drops tap out what
is left of this late, ruined day in July.

Here there is no history, if by history you mean
the soul fir