All night
my motion arouses the dust and leaves
and my headlight dazzles the kangaroos
emerging from the sleep of farm-town edges
illuminated by that same moon
under which stand bronze Anzacs
at ease between the wars.
That moonlight’s a dreamscape
where paddocks, restless with mice
frame silos standing in stillness.
Thundering across the country like a dare-devil
a bike boy of the '50s
tyre marks of scattered dust
in low gear shifting skyward up a hill.
Now the tail-light glows. Only just.
Strung out on the hills like those many others
alive after dusk
and spanning a continent,
it’s many parts nameless, but placed,
the night I rode for Ouyen on little petrol.
This is red earth country.
It looks empty and open
but is crowded with ghosts.
Those figures are hidden away in the folds of it
invisible here, and there
but letting me know I am watched.
Tracked.
At day I stop and look into the blaze of sunlight
and know I am not the only one.
They go on like I do
and my having been here makes a ghost of me too
a moment in time that will always have been
a moment toward which I have always been making.
Spring night
sweepers
on the road to Ouyen.
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