e spiked wooden ball
swishes from tree canopy to impale
support cast. Sunday matinee in country
town. Farm boys lope under dirty clouds
to crop-dusted paddocks, and water
slips by the BP Service Station, somewhere.

8. Continental Shelf Co.

I officially declare the millennial
Poets Symposium on the Age of Inner
Space now open: Welcome to OCEANISM.
Poets are required to be proficient
in submarine mythology of an exploratory
and Cousteauesque manner, able to
identify myriad life-forms luminescent yet
undiscovered (except, perhaps, for the
Vampire Squid) at depths unsounded, in
sea trenches unknown, free, hopefully of
maritime wrecks & missiles from any epoch;
whose task it is to float lines at once
filigreed as plankton, filtered as sunlight.

9. Three Cheers The Militia!

What plays us back - death? That
this worlds a stage and we upon it act
to revolve the scenery with our yearning:
and while the syrinx play, panic rebounds
to the dead cry: ET IN ARCADIA EGO
from the walled garden and far wilderness.
O desert! O armour-plated sun!
Under a scornful wind the madmen bellow
and tribes cower amongst the rubble,
caught in the sound bites & grabs of war:
Tibet, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Iraq, Burundi,
plus the boys in the hills back of Montana.

10. Video Conference

Like a hurried geology that
arose out off glasshouses came the
skyscrapers; meanwhile, History
cut a swathe through the Natural World
and architecture strove to regain it.
Lost to the familiar, Age moved us
out of living memory, unlike those tribes,
the autochthons who saw the earths
infancy still. Let us go, you & I,
to re-invent the damage and call it
discovery, to uniformly lift up our cry
in schadenfreude, meek before Great Cities
that bend as fenders to the glare.

11. Crow Country

A field of wheat, a paddock of
stubble, the chafed dust-cloud staggers
the pick-up at distance, the Rock
of Ages rises over Plainville: pop:
dead serious. No hermits, only
the bowing pumps facing west for oil.
Family photos hang easy next to
the semiautomatic in each clapboard.
The Long Horn Saloon boasts the
one rule: NO SPITTING. NO STRANGERS.
The hard hats passed round every
Sunday and the big fists knuckle under
prayer & flag real righteous like.

12. Hills Of Home

Greywacke mostly, & fat pale
clay where I troubled the hills about
Wellington (Brooklyn-west) that
you dug through to reach China as a
kid out-the-back of our place.
Th