Classic Poem

The dark green, the light green,
the pale native rosemary flowers,
blue-grey like low rain clouds,
and, behind them, an intense spiked green
of boronia, seed-heads, meadow-grass,
thistles and thistle-heads —
a slope of them, a scarred bank,
held down by agapanthus clumps,
rambling grevillea, more boronia:
patches of bare, hard clay
exposed where the sun burns out the
surface, or where little run-offs
stop the grass from taking, offer a
tattered shawl of thin weeds, spires of fireweed,
a kind of parsley, twigs,
bark-litter from a gum-tree,
and the bake of a harsh, blue sky
reflected in quartz-hued
pebbles, a sandstone rock
not too heavy to lift, dwarf-sized
escarpments waving with
shell grass, dandelions, small groundsels
also flowering. There are slender violets,
too, which I thought had been
introduced, but I looked them
up: they’re native — two-toned, purple
and pale mauve (like lilac)

interlaced with chickweed
and couch grass. The land slopes somewhat
there, giving that chance
of openness which some species need
as well as the chance of dead erosion
by rain, by heat which splits
earth — I mean, by motion
of soils as natural as the shifts
which hollow out slow changes

in any body tak-
ing on contours of age and use.
Taking on more, it’s a
place for everything, allowing an
instant of transformation — of wildness —
as a registering
of greenness beyond the eye’s
capacity (what does it see?) to
grade green as straw-coloured,

verdant, or shadowed. A
green re-mapped by swirls of firetails
on a seed-search. In such
half-seeing of the world, it’s the bird’s-
eye view which makes the tangle into a
fixed space for words, adding
once more that hint of pale
rainy blue, shimmering beneath
the network of grasses:
a phrase like “everything’s
place” might be appropriate to this
lingering gaze — though that’s
to say, “lost to its people,“ “no long-
er mantic,” “not named in speech.” Small patch
of earth. It stays like this
until you understand it
as light, unconscious flesh; and it
becomes you, as you it.