Five Cantos from the Divine Comedy

They dream ocean currents here: landlocked,
low-rise valley, foot of purgatory 
tidal and exposed to the drag of planets.

Farmers travel to Albany for holidays,
and the Southern Ocean pounds and grinds
continental granite, contorted vegetation

low to fronts always crossing, brushing...
a five-hour drive a stone’s throw away,
the white-sand beaches of Frenchman’s Bay,

white-pointers cruising deep waters
malodorous with sea shanties. Sometimes,
after retirement, it’s the Greek islands,

or the Peloponnese or Sicily... and these coastlines
also gnaw as pain and salvation, a nervous tic,
yes, yes... our paddocks were salt-water and krill.

Denim jeans tucked into work boots, partially
gripping the rocky outcrop; we slip and conjure
aspirations of bare feet, wrapped 

about stone and root, the valley flooded
with water fresh as quartz.
A local wind sweeps the crest,

clouds of locusts high-tailing it to green fringes.
Bare feet have us possessed.
We try taking the summit with boots off.

Skin glows like morning, then a bloody sunset.
The locusts are angels and our feet their purpose.
Rare trees die as we profane the terrain.

Ants test any willing suspension of disbelief
our oxygenated lungs trick us into: inside our boots
damaged feet have no redress, no peace.

Solvent light on leaves.
She barely sees surfaces,
barely breaks through epidermis

to mesophyll, following
prosody of vascular tissue;
she signs with leaf scale, 

rust, mildew, epinasty,
and those fallen in late summer —
dry curvilinear graph paper,

each miniscule frame blown out,
hot easterlies blasting over
vast, naked sandplain,

rocking skyscraper haystacks
to sway breaking wave
and collapse, burst out

like countersignatures.
Leaves flutter down
from dying crowns,

snowflakes she recalls
from frozen regions: each death
perfect and different

as the next. No rain 
will come. No fresh leaves 
burgeon. No gyres

made entire. She 
scatters her verses 
to blaze, to melt, 

crumble always,
the infinitive,
      a future.

And so I went to the dip in the land
and awaited the shade,  sunset stretched
as autumn, catching bare steel sharply,

limp deflection off painted iron, the child’s swing 
buckling sideways with the cross-breeze, discarded
cotton bud unwinding on its stem

near the clothesline; across the windscreen
of the stranded Rodeo ute, block-mounted,
a ruby and emerald light skitters 

like an advertising logo, a ring of truth
in thin wafts of smoke we barely sense as danger
despite a combustive dry, past witnessings

of what follows such a herald; scrunched
against the stubble, barely-established York gums
speed up their dying, termites mewing,

scorpions, tails up, glowing with the infra red
of prayers, inflicted as we expect infliction
of suffering — to pass, as night will pass...

and light return, the stomach hollow
as night feeders search out day-shade, sleeping,
digesting without a shred of guilt,

a ring of ‘Beati misericordes’ sounding tangents
to our encirclings, heading up the laneway,
up to the road reserve where kangaroos 

gingerly graze and black-faced cuckoo shrikes
strike at lifting butterflies, rip into the young
of nearby species, maybe wagtails’, those up-lifters.

Down the track, brilliantly satisfying
mind-wheels, borrowings of pleasure
that spin chrome and sunlight glinting

from its centre. I am here, the axle,
the hub of a flooded estate, water up
and seagulls clustering like angels

around the lighthouse. Below ground, caves
glimmer their bold delicacies: cautious
and sumptuous, the drip-down, solvents

of flight. Out to sea, off the cape,
rainclouds adhere to the swell, and birds
join at the wings making light

where the sun is, should be. Soothed
despite the gale, waves smashing rough rocks
below the lookout, you stand firm

and seals gambol in pools of relative calm,
as if watching the birds perform
their rites of storm, instinct to fill the sky.