In evenings, the spider’s

fountain of legs spreads

itself in corners of thought:

‘What shall we talk about?

How fill the time:

Shall we love?’

Days: we pour ourselves into them,

they drain away.

 

But in the timid colours of dawn, we step

Like spacemen through the naked streets,

our footsteps echoing in the skulls of houses:

(in dawn-light, our bodies shine

with a corpse’s lunar relief).

 

And leaves in the breath of breezes

dance like kites through the restless morning,

wheel the downward drifts of air, break

open the river smooth as polished steel

to its razored rim; no thought

but leaves, sinking in the new day.

 

(from Summerland; A Western Australian Sesquicentenary Anthology of Poetry and Prose. Ed. Alec Choate & Barbara York Main. UWA Press