Panic Very Softly, Love
RAIN HAS PAINTED out the top of Snake Hill
and cloud has got loose in the orchard.
But no one’s tipped the horses off that the rest of the day’s been cancelled.
Five of them, fifty shades greyer than the weather, browse the wet paddock
As if it were the local paper
in which only the old news runs. But over the ridge
It’s a different story: light falls, rain lifts, weather breaks
Like news across all the forests and the fields
that keep the city stranded on the coast.
A blue heron flies low over me—
its head making off with its body—as I drive
The last paddocks and take the freeway east. At Hilltop,
Where the bush burned down a month back,
Cicadas are in a panic of desire,
and new leaves flap a pale blue panegyric
Among the recovering gums, those addicts of fire. The sandstone gorge I love
The way a child loves her father
is a thousand years deep in loneliness and longing
When I cross it in a flash flood of morning light,
the specific gravity of hope. At the Picton Road, a parachutist
Drops hard toward what looks for all the world like his certain death
But turns out to be the landing field, and he pulls down behind him a large piece
Of the brand new summer sky. Even Icarus gets another
shot at it today. The world spins
Its yarn(s), thick with paradox and taut with metaphor, unwinding every plotline
One moment to the next. And death
is the only conclusion it refuses
to come to. Something always
beginning where something else leaves off.