A puppet-woman whose bosom is ruined hay,
whose fermented heart is mildew, whose madness is ergot,
carries a low-slung infant on her back. Is it even dead?
Three kookaburras perch each morning,
their triple obesities of plumage tilting the gruesome head
this way, that.

Crack willows in the sump are bare-legged beggars,
the yellow leaves atop, little papery prayer-flags of bleakness
waved aloft.
An olive-whistler with a bowie-blade for a beak
taps at every window, stabbing an imaginary rival.
Men's voices carry from above this underworld,

and dull brown wrens flit, titter and forage.
The grass at the fence-line has grown tall,
and is laden, heavy with seed, while I am laden
with last summer's long-forgotten need.
Why is it so lonely, when we meet?
a vast No Man's Land stretches
between two land-locked countries.
Sometimes, when you speak, I watch your eyes.
Wordlessly, they call out to me,
but your mouth keeps moving,
like a grim border guard at his post.
There's only one moment when the gates are lifted-
you turn and lean. I enter into the whiskers,
the rough gilt of your jaw. A forest of sweet elms.
I feel that I am entering, and I see, for a second,
the place beyond the golden trees. The furthermost.

A traffic jam of geese honks good-naturedly
from a make-believe puddle in the grass.
Today, everything seems empty of you.
This time of year, the sedges in the paddock are
blotted and beige, are watercolours,
stroked fine and bled into the page.

Alone, I call for you.
My words are terrible animal cries.
Nothing you ever said meant anything.
Always, it was what you didn't say.
Always, it was the time that you weren't there.
It was the place in my bed where you didn't lie.
You were my husband of the air.

This is how my tears will come-
warm and slippery,
they will make my fingertips smell of the sea.
My husband of the empty bed, husband of the air,
I whimper for the lonely vacancy between my legs.

Husband of not-there-at-all,
my heart beats loud and strained.
Its solitary drumming makes no sense of
this dreary abstinence.
Our pillow-talk is a midnight plover's call.
When the shame is over, I roll on my side,
and curve around the familiar body of your dear absence.

April has spackled my world with fancy.
My long-haired neighbour,
tiny under the cottonwood break,
is a petrol-driven sylvan wraith.
Blue smoke rises around her, an autumnal mist.
Perhaps, instead of writing this lonesome poem,
I will bake myself a white-ash wedding cake.