A Triptych: Cut Landscapes in Haulm-light
By Matthew Hall
I
quill’s ascendency | in the leaves
|of dawn’s wash
accelerant braided
in the updraft
the light scratches upon the dumb breath
of our mutual solitudes
by syllabic lapping
moving before the encampment
she gathers up bones and iridescence
hands trailing through a spill
of white ash
amanuensis |
the elicit sound
II
inland of estuary depth,
reading as sentences
the reddened landscape;
upon a rock face, before defense or slaughter
acts of gods are prodigious streaks of ochre and ash
numinous motions of a fire-lit night.
III
like water in water
footsteps in the dry sand’s unseasonal heat
a wound of ineluctable conclusion
this path in its thousandth year
legs scathed by spinifex
light-bare space
the burning itself barely a breathing
a scar-torn chest | a ritual of ancestry
a ritual of death’s elucidation
fallen, a history
By Matthew Hall
The shade of this flaxen
colour spreads over
this tired path. I bear
the ebb of wood
the bow of thistle, it is
a monocline image of growth
as the distance to main tributaries
Singing and dying
on the road hands
wreck the dull comportment
count back the years, tempered to white
She wants
the patient tract of motion
or the value of drinking of the stone
chalice of dispossession
Tidal winds shift on
the worn sutures of field
where the pallid sky bends forward
over fallow ground’s enclosures
and distinctions, too thinly sown for seed
Surge what would toll across
rising up over tannin’s steep salve
at the sedge turn nothing accounts
for a moment which cuts to the quick
Light feasts in pollen filaments
hemmed to the ardent wire.