It has become one of life's buried places;
parallel lines,
river and road,
wetlands, levees.
The waters brim dark
brown above our heads,
banks thick with dark mud
like that drenched English landscape
where, after six thousand years,
a man was removed
from the layered peat
with a noose still around his neck,
legs pulled up close to a chest
snuggling under the warm weight
of all that earth.
Here, guard dogs
howled in the distance,
invisible leashes,
the extended horizon.
There was a place
where we stopped
and it is gone.
It is a buried place.
Do you remember the lines?
How straight they were?
The scrappy paddocks
ground like soaked sponge,
the limitless sky
pressing it flat.
You had a puncture,
and we stopped in the cold,
in the flatness below a bank,
on the uncomfortable flat rim,
grey stones sharp as knives.
The wind from a long way away.
Water transporting itself somewhere.
That place is buried now,
the lines that led us there,
under the unendurable earth.
Some things cannot be raised up.
for Les Murray
Always they exist in neat rows,
though the stick-thin, skeletal frameworks,
breaking out untidy, in winter,
seasonally dispense with tradition.
In spring there is firmness in the lines,
they stretch for paddock beyond paddock,
the red orbs or russet-coloured globes glow
in sun that is always filtering through leaves,
white blossom like tufts of cotton.
At the edges of roads, mutations, seed-blown,
explode in colour by the dreary pencil-pines,
plain green, tender, able-top size,
plundered each Christmas by town people.
Now, driving through apple country,
I am rejoicing in the straightness of the roads, and rows,
dust settling on the groves of apple trees,
orchards, red tractors, a roll of fencing wire
coiled in the corner like a discarded idea.
There is the spraying machine abandoned three years
ago,
there are wooden boxes stencilled with the names of orchardists
and there is man walking, tilted,
chain-saw bouncing lightly on his thigh,
silent between rows and rows under the twisting, bristling branches
of apple trees.
In the centre of the paddock is a large fire.
It is drizzling and the fire is orange.
The cows do not huddle around it.
They do not look at it.
At the centre of the flat field a fire,
the cold air pressing around it.
Someone has piled the wood on,
but they are gone.
And the cows are indifferent to the fire.
They graze all over the cold field.
There could be a tragedy on the field.
A manor could be burning.
A fire burns at the centre of their world,
and the cows are scattered like seeds.
But wait, it is not quite random.
No cow is near the fire.
No animal burns in the flames.