On The Road

1
Faces: masks behind wheels …
Sealed in, hurtling snow-blind
through each smooth white mile,
we crouch in our easy glide.
There are no real signs …
only that horse's tail
tossing behind its float,
conjuring soft grass, swift
freedom, as it waves us past.
2
On Geelong Road, wind tunnel sixty miles long,
you leave Melbourne, enter Geelong, with a refinery
on your left: pricked in lights like a circus
yet cheerless as a launching pad,
lending almost a sense of drama
to those wastes of industrial landscape
servicing the city,
wearing its citizens
down and out: fouling
an already barren earth.
3
A landscape waiting to be graced
by darkness; the highway speckled
with colours brittle as counters
in a child's game. Towards sunset,
a crumpled door catches the sky —
blue metal streams like crushed silk.
4
Hitchhikers jerk eyes or faces,
stand like bored gods, indifferent
to fumes or gusts.
Drivers pass,
glance idly at their load of luggage, kids,
then accelerate,
tuning back into the wheels, the cogs,
the anxious whirring silence of their lives.
5
Near that lone tree in a windswept field
two horses stand sheltering each other —
so calm beneath the amber shadows of their eyes.
6
Approaching Alexandra, you pass a paradisal valley,
your eyes discover it, thread with its silver river
a grand mosaic of green, then stop at that dying tree:
writhing totemic whiteness high as this clifftop.
You refocus the scene, leave with a different memory.
7
A mare, white-grey inside
a grey, flat paddock
ambles dream-like
into the near horizon —
almost crosses it,
standing deep and solid
against a parched sky.
8
Near the murderous Hume, they are tumbling
in slow motion through centuries — great stones
heaped around smooth, broad hillocks: each challenging
them, each larger than a man, as they grow and fall,
changing through all the moods of darkness and of light.
How they crouch about each other now, incandescent
in the dusk; for so long they have endured: patterned
with mosses, pitted by an eternity of rain …
Aborigines may have walked by here and worshipped,
time out of mind, their minds like deep-growing roots
alive inside the earth. These grey, burnished faces
cluster in godhead. Silence. Nothing can be said.