Poem # 40 Towards the Nullabor

Towards the Nullabor

Highway drafted across
wide brown landscape
a drawing line
shimmering graphite grey
into the west,
explorers footsteps.
Cool breeze in my hair,
and the motor sings its
highway song.
I am the soul of the van.
We glide past gargantuan
harvesters and headers,
they have no soul.
Up ahead in the distance
shimmering water
never there.
A lonely isolated service centre,
a frontier outpost.
Was it there before?
Does it really exist
amongst the twisted
denuded blackbutt branches
dry reaching for the sky?
I am surrounded in semiology.

Poem # 39 Kalymnos

Kalymnos

The sea, pearl turquoise,
mountains ash-blue in the windless heat,
a puppy fat caique puffs past
in a line like little ducklings,
its bow wave a dark miraging
ripple on the creamy blue
surface of the sea.
All that is left of its passing
is the tiny tongue lap
of the transparent blue water
on the stones,
the waiting green crown of pine trees,
the tiny motor chorus
buzz of insects, and
the enormous landscape of silence.
My eyelids droop in
the thin shade of a pine,
in the agelessness, the
absolute dissociation of
a natural, wild
Greece.