Before you could say Jack Robinson, I was posting
a letter in the box that looks like a lean-to
at the crepuscular end of the mind. The fire-fangled glow
from the South kept sending small birds into the air
until they capitulated as an augury of burnt offerings.
Each wife, a postmistress, you pursued your loveless
schemes through the endpapers of summer while
I played the craftsman maintaining a constant foliage.
We shared an inborn contrariness. Plain sense
is a pedant that demands the sensual offsets of marriage
and mining for, in the green days, we had enjoyed
an abundance of eel-sleek phrases and gentian skies
to profit underneath. Now the body is mere receptacle
and the modernist label returns psalm to sender.
An anatomy of systematic thinking once tissued
skin and tendon, each logician once looked for the light
of human song. Now I replicate bronze décor
and plump feathers that fail to shine. Ballarat is
on borrowed epic, Queenscliff hands out support
in sets of non-adhesive stamps. A flight of parakeets
evades memory, mnemonic perforations to contemplate:
everything was gone now, lost in a blistering haze.