Every morning, with an authority
of clinging, earthy foundations
a house sat in air.
Inside someone was singing an aria
about how love inflects its failings
and a woman, absorbed in her toilette
considered how pained words work
the world awry, even as air fills with song.
Outside a man hammered boards
to make a dwelling; crows sat on a wire
as if planning insurrection.
Drought held paddocks tightly
as a team ran a divining rod
over corrugations of salt.
Rain, when it started,
was a kind of stumbling.

Paul Hetherington