Have You Seen

… the way the trees—that sclerophyll fraternity on the mountain—swarm
Like Dante’s shades as you drive among them in the rain on the way down
To Bridget’s place, as though you were the only still thing left on earth?

The way the trees in their cardboard orders, their five or six slim, avuncular
Throngs, orbit in eccentric circles of disbelief about you. And till then you
Had thought that the woods stood still. But even the mountains move.

And have you noticed how sometimes a crimson rosella and a little wattle-
Bird and a black hen drink peaceably from the same trough as though colour
Were an idea foreign to them, for a moment, and how the alder flares

Vermillion, and the elms are down to their underwear, and the oak is yet to turn
Its mind to winter, and the Japanese maple by the house is still at the end
Of summer, as though difference meant something more and autumn something
 
Less than you had thought? And have you noticed the way you smell the rain
Before it falls, the way you dream a migraine before it grips, and the way
You write a word a moment before you hear it in a story on the radio news?
 
There are words out there, and some of them are trees, and some of them are birds,
And some of them are crimes. And one of them is me. There are strangers lost in
The woods, and you are one. Night comes. Rain falls on the roof the way you fall
 
Asleep and I fall in love almost daily with something or somewhere. And then
Stop. Love is a blanket we pull over our solitude. And down on the floodplain,
The river lies in her nakedness and lets time play over her floating breasts.