Rusted path: hardened snake,
defunct narrow-gauge
through winding surf-creeks
Toyota’s speeding
crawl through eucalyptus
“sacred way”
cut into sun-slope:
grass-eyed waiting rooms
yellow-flaked
behind the white, rough-crowned city,
the mountain gulf
overturns the plains,
sky-cave of spiral
drainage of the sun
casting glens transparent,
stirring the windscreen,
tides of the sun
unbury infinite detail
shadows in pistachio
traps and deliria
tangled, running,
gaps in the orchards,
the agricultural structure,
ancient woven base
to the mountain Geraneia;
dykes and rock-barrows
waving down to Megara
from Geraneia’s wooden circuit-wall
of strawberry trees, forests,
open-air altar slabs,
straining the Toyota
through fretwork of interwoven
orchards clicking
as they move together
in the heat of summer;
insect, wicker,
dead bark shed
from the budding mountain,
Toyota playing
The Doors’ “The End”
(idols carved by trunks and shadows)
“ride the king’s highway”
at school I’d fall in love
“ride the highway west”
and by March become depressed,
May air made one malleable,
brought the scent of journeys,
bitter August, alone,
thoughts of others’ holidays
“the snake is long,
seven miles — ”
and sad foreign songs, from over the oceans,
the liquid snake-head
with death in the day-shape,
tides of the sun,
night-softening,
life melting into porous
caves of the blue
scrubbage of nightscape.
And the period of the guardian moon
after wild evening
and the streaming light of the streets subsides.
