This stillness before rain – a field, its
broken statues overrun with grass –
their eyes – split seedheads, sky-backed,
thronged with light – tussock, speargrass,
wild fennel – irradiate its white stare – this
middle distance built perpetually
out from the statues’ eyes – in which
each word lives in its own landscape,
widening back through silent weather
‘as though at home’ – Their hands –
half-open, palms turned upwards –
in couch-grass, its scratch-fine shadows – are
broken gestures – out of scale, themselves
a landscape worn with touching – inventing
vanishing points inside its ranks of stone –
these head-high mounds of building wreckage –
bluestone, broken concrete – with the sky
growing back from them – clouds
infolding silence – ‘much, and so cold’ –
in dazed tumult the colour of molten glass
where its light pours through – Now
a bright-edged blotch – fogging in old celluloid –
transforms into a ray containing
sequence within itself and small rain floats
inside its landscape walled in glass –
Do you remember? A factory. A path.
Train lines, curving away and back
to where they are hung in light – unallusive,
single, arraying themselves over that gulf
which is the distance of my eye – and its
surface shivers, grass in wind – now
sliding back into its solitude –
making candid that ‘need for something new
which all the myths proclaim’ –

Lisa Gorton