Yorke Peninsula, Easter

1.

I drive out ten years
from the city's heavy gravity,
from the safety of numbers;

returning to childhood,
to fields of sweat and dust,
scraps of eucalypt,
wheezing crows;

to the backyard of summer,
the brown brown grass of home.

2.

I mean nothing profound by this:
no sermon against the sheep-race of cities,
no speech in praise of grass.
I prefer asphalt.

I mean just going home on a long weekend,
driving back through monotonous fields,
or driving in circles
through the same fields again.

3.

I sleep in the car
in the sentimental night,
behind windscreens foggy with dreams.

Tired eyes alter the darkness
to the different geography of childhood:

warrens trapped, bushes climbed,
beatings given and received.

From each dead field
these harvests of memory.

4.

In the morning
sunlight reconstructs the world.

The sky is cold,
the kitchen windows shiver
in their fields.

In one of them I am a child,
the woodstove is alight,

and from the chimney
dreams drift and vanish like smoke.