This heady time of year the wattles flood,
Leaving come-scums of yellow flotsam
In the gullies, as though August
Were a savage river of airy sweetness
Filling those hollows scraped and
Scoured by the sharp-edged wait of winter.

Lean goats in hungry paddocks
The colour of their own salted curd
Stand on feisty legs
And strain as greedy brides might strain
For the tender bluish feathers;
Their soft-muzzled mouths
Powdered with orgies of blossom.

***

Where suede leathering of wattle feather-froths the gully
The bush is crushed with a yellow as greasy as linseed or
Museum oxide tingling under a purple light.

Silver-eyes scoot up and down, all homeless boys
On skateboards; and nearby geese heckle with the sorry
Grace of a Catholic football crowd.

A posh throat on the hill calls toodle-pip! toodle-pip!
A boarding-school plum in its mouth; and all the air
Around full of grating bird-hinges needing oil.

Other tiny bird-beasts space themselves on a clothesline-
Snapped wooden between winter-stained pegs,
And a wren hops, below, as though tweaked on a string.

Fowls jut their chins and very 'umble, leaving the slide-show
Too early. Did you hear the boobook call the time
With the shumble-mouthing of a misplaced wireless?

There are chinks of ice moonstoning the grass, and blue smoke
Silks upward from a chimney, like strong spirits
Into water, aniseeding the bite of the air,

Cloudy-ing it; the morning sky a haze of spring-grass milking,
As though someone has spilt the fatcream, smearing a burning
Lantern lightness in the deepness of a cooling-trough.

That plastic bucket is a dry joke that a crazed one-eared
Painter might spend years of his life quizzing; and it
Would still bucket there when he dies, being too yellow to undo.

***

A heifer moans by the roadside, her bewildered face
Outlined with fine sable-strokes of desire;
Her hindquarters a sunrise of longing.
The willows in the creekbed are still leafless,
But aching in the groin, with that
Bursting out of the skin with lust-
Filling the gully with the sweet yeasty cloy
Of longing longing longing...

Even the sound wetting your tongue,
And making your eyes brim with
The coursing of bright blood in your tight veins...
Bright as a blind whore's plum-poisoned mouth,
Bright as a bright boy-boy eye, tinkered with black;
Bright as beautiful...another whisper-word
That touches your mouth with its own whist.

O beautiful!
You freshen my eyes the way high freshets...
The way wild freesias...
And blue sky blown huge by some blue-breath god...
My eyes never tire, though they know
It is not a virtue, your Beauty,
But a fact. You wear it like a tattoo
Burnt on you at birth.

And I couldn't love it, but could watch it
All the live-longing day; passing over you-
A thousand different shimmering shy masks.
And my eyes would never tire-

It is the other one who makes me bleary-tired;
Who makes my dull old heart ache.
I know the matte truth of him in a thousand slow ways,
And when I look at him, my eyes weigh tired
With his big ordinariness, his dear unloveliness.
And when he sees me sudden, and he smiles upwards,
The mask of beauty that doesn't belong
Passes over his upturned face like a sly cloud-shadow
And it makes me love, with its canny swift cloud-tricks.

***

The dreamy time of year...
The cool kept sweetness in a woman's deep fastnesses
Wells up and trickles brackish, then rushes
Clean along unlit stone pathways and granite ravines
Gone belly-sour with waiting-
Filling the shaded and fronded hollows
Neglected by a long long winter.

Woman's throat skin has faded, in the dark,
To the colour of her own salt.
Lie your weight down here, now:
Your length there on her ah! blued feathers;
Your soft-muffled mouth
Licked with yellow blossoms.
Nuzzle, now, the tangy hollows
Abandoned at last by the long, dry spell.