PETRIFIED –

your heart’s tongue seized

mid-syllable, caught by the lava flow

you fled. Fixed,

you stiffen in the arms of wonder’s dark

undomesticated sister. Can’t you name her

and escape? You are the statue

that has lost the entrance into art,

wild and incompetent,

you have no house. Who are you?

You are the crystal that picks up

its many deaths.

You are the momentary mind of rock.

LOSS CREEK

He went there to have it

exact. The broken prose of the bush roads.

The piles of half-burnt slash. Stumps

high on the valley wall like sconces

on a medieval ruin. To have it tangible.

To carry it as load rather than as mood

or mist. To heft it – earth measure,

rock measure – and feel its raw drag without phrase

for the voice or handle for the hand.

He went there to hear the rapids curl around

the big basaltic boulders saying

husserl husserl, saying I’ll

do the crying for you, licking the schists

into flat skippable discs. That uninhabited laughter

sluicing the methodically shorn valley.

He went there to finger the strike/slip

fissure between rock and stone between Vivaldi’s

waterfall and the wavering note a varied thrush

sets on a shelf of air. Recognizing the