Epilogue
High forest and understory
converge with the ruin of day,
the collapsing narrative thread—
traffic never far away—
earshot merely a colloquial hum
as songbirds contract with scrub,
the collation of gunblast beyond
the jurisdiction of the Wildlife Trust;
etiquette of castigation in a pastoral voice
barely showing through
as Major Mitchell enters the interior
of Tropical Australia and quotes Ovid:
"Communemque prius ceu lumina solis et auras
Cautus humum longo signavit limite mensor"
and steps up the veracity
and range of the Voice,
confirming enclosure,
the haptic integration of sense organs,
their turbulence across
oiled waters of survey data,
hydraulics of boundary machines
in the "Gothic hypothesis" of Outback—
that sea for depressives
who would die unsatisfied
if they actually found a reef of gold—
"O soule be chang'd into little water drops
And fall into the Ocean, ne're be found."
With the draining, the water Brethren
assembled against the drainers
and Pastor Albrecht was heard to utter
from deep within Centralia:
"When we came here
we thought we had found
the only people in the world
without religion. Now
we have learnt
that they are among
the most religious people
in the world" as yet again
the monks at Ely
refuse to toe
the party line.
"It's what you don't have that counts!"
yells the Capitalist, while you—
wanting soule as the radio "blasts"
and diminishing woods struggle to coppice—
peruse missives from the last settlers,
uncomfortable in their paradox,
while sheep are trucked to market
and seed bins emptied,
the sunset ashen and sentimentality
left stranded on a dirt road
going nowhere. An echidna
is crushed by a stranger
coming to grips with the edges
of what is now his paddock—
"All beasts are happy, for when they die,
Their souls are soone dissolv'd in elements..."—
it being neither here nor there
that the first badger
and hedgehog you see
in this, your New Country,
should lie dead upon the road—
at night you might say "At least
there aren't any kangaroos
to worry about!" the impact
potentially fatal.
Page(s) 33-34
magazine list
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