For Marcia Stewart
After a day of Greek references, lunch, and Freudian puns
the mythoi aren’t appropriate to the dapple and sting-rays
any more than to a brain verbalising everlastingly
on its right-side stones and its left-side waters. But, no less,

the TV, modernity’s end, the abolition of craft in networks —
all those roadways through intelligent starlit places —
are short meeting-spaces with cartoon characters
hanging in trees, or just the other side of the bay.

I read Soundsite, Leonardo, Fanzine and MLA.
Outside, water noise ripples in flickering rosemary bushes.
Inside, the modem chatters in its own drifting sky.
Sometimes it’s a frog by a creek. My hand glides with its mouse.

Smart theorists, like hang-gliders, call this sensory geography
which maps travel through the texts which build it, a place
of fire in which the passageways are infinite yet framed.
There’s no closeness. Or too much. A pack of cards, a street vanishes.

Appliances are light and portable. You need nothing.
Not just the heat, you dress in sleeveless shirts and go barefoot.
Even to work is to study fragments which are locked, submarine,
while the air’s cinematic forest jangles its symbols of light —

tempting, though, to invent new worlds through patched-up bits,
floating in a medium less real than water. Names are tags,
which once were metaphors, for views down the road,
for the boss, for the book or the sea: or rather, for rags

weightlessly falling as in the last scene in that Antonioni movie,
where the whole house explodes like a flight of birds.
What’s left is its owner’s first risky choice, a Mojave Desert view.
It was the desert there which gave the sense of distant clouds.

Myself, too, I usually work my best far away from water.
I prefer it as one element among dry-country scapes
which here only the pathway’s European rosemary reminds me of —
like a mallee sunset over a plain of yellow-flowering rape

whose sharp, flat skyline becomes a shimmering lake and burns,
or, air-borne, like the sense that an ancient tide’s exposed the Olgas,
sculpted by sand storms and the air’s weight. Residues which repeat,
this use of drifting, underwater images is a sign of our times:

that is, until a slow-building change occurs towards mid-afternoon,
shifting the glare in the grey gum overhanging the verandah
and spilling out pale blue hammerheads over blunt, green slopes.
Perhaps I get up to close the windows. Somewhere, a minah-

bird starts to fret. There’s a tropical stillness. Then branches move.
Briny, the heat comes on moody, heavy, grey as a porpoise,
inclining the yachts in leeward wind as if they’re random shapes,
abstract triangles like styrofoam chips, fleeting, behind glass:

you see them caught in a bar of choppy wavelets — it’s like a wedge —
or frozen on a water-shelf, dark as the Sargasso’s and as strange.
Now, as the wind whips up, they make their way to the channel,
where the ocean they engrave slops about in a white meringue.

It was Plato (that dramatist) who first distinguished place from space,
granting the latter its deathly power of giving, mapping, taking away,
imagining it as a sieve sifting the threshed Just-Nows —
a wall of brightness landing across stormy, green-chipped wakes,

or a fruitful, black bulb of laden sea-cloud about to burst its charge.
The yachts sail away under it like ducks gliding on a shooting-range.
Conscious of the change, I shift the pointers on the flowing screen
and log instructions for a letter which needs ten seconds to Brisbane,

half-catching only the suspense of the quick, unnoticed tuning
by which the wind's simplest shiver across the grey gum is a voice,
still whispering as it once did: Yes, I wait at the known world’s pillars.
Or: A boat of flowers bearing you, I am the old man’s winnow.