ed in the kiln of time. Here there is only
the compilation of event in a scrap-yard of days
& kicked aside incident.

You can still hear the
settlers squeeze box & fiddle in suburban settlements &
tavern, the landscape-flat accents, the Sky Channel
applause and throat-clearing of smoke exhaust.

We remember the po-faced poets who went away never to
return from the Ambition Wars & Success Sorties.

As always, cars chittering in long queues in the
persimmon light of dusk, on freeways dreary with drizzle
and distance, at the encoded city-bound intersections.

He makes his heroine his addiction and vice versa,
becomes the object of obsession into which safe-zone he
precipitates himself, unmanned.

Away now from that well worn cliche,
the crazy party hat of Sydneys Opera House / the bat-eared
shells

& clouds that muscle reflective buildings

to the O so cloacal coil of green hills round the
rectangular cattle, prominent as so many out-of-town acts
in provincial centres.

You pass smoothly in your car the valley below & there -
an intimate scene: a family gathered shock still: the
overhanging forest imaged on the coffin-lid,

momentarily,
then lowered into shadow. The town lies behind you.

The world will change to that which forgets you
and your enthusiasms will be as a passing fashion. In this
you come to understand the nature of illusion

and the hoped for
expectations of youth, a too well-travelled dream. Here
where life recedes further into distance

you will know yourself as unmanned.

Braidwood

for Judith Wright

Granite & quartz country, once
gold rush, now cattle tread amongst

the white hawthorn and yellow broom;
from Captains Flat to Majors Creek

the creek-beds cut the empty vein.

Hail or heat, the hanged ghost
of Thomas Braidwood rolls out his

oaths big as boulders upon the town:
dust, poverty, despair, drunkenness

before he choked his rage at the
end of a rope, phlegm thick as gossip.

November 4, 1996

Modern Love

1.

They are survivors, the sole
occupants of this one guarded world.
The local repertory theatre packed
up & departed elsewhere. These two
old troupers stay on as the sweeper
plays his broom against the grain
backstage. They play out by agreement
the familiar angers to a suspension
of