Front porch, set up in a row of chairs,
given a bucket of pods, we were told
to wash the grit then prise the husk for peas.
A chore I didn’t mind, I took my time
over every pail, over each repetitive task...
Snap off the ends, tear open the strip,
split the hull and with a run of the thumb
rake the peas into the pot. Repeat.

Like needle-point or roping knots,
it was work my parents were grounded in.
I hardly tired of it, just eased into a certain
order, felt a kind of rhythm at hand.
Shelling, I lulled into the routine work...
Snap off the ends, tear open the strip,
split the hull and with a run of the thumb
rake the peas into the pot. Repeat.

Soon I learnt to feel the variance between
each seam, between the notched ends,
the ridged sides. A boy, my fingers intent
and nimble as a lace maker’s, I peeled
back the layers, split the husks, the green...
Snap off the ends, tear open the strip,
split the hull and with a run of the thumb
rake the peas into the pot. Repeat.




On the flat roads, just out of the mountains,
a light strobes in an outhouse of a distant yard
and a dog, drenched with rain,
scampers with its tail down
to the road.



It is almost dark, and the last of the light
falls onto the canola fields, and onto the hillsides
full of Paterson’s curse.

I pull over and watch the sun sink
into a stretch of grass.



It plumes from the fire’s red hearth,
sends up its flag of stored aeons
and multifarious resins in a surly

blue charred blaze. Rain-cloud dark
and featherweight, it leaks from any
pooled heat or gone-to-ground tinder

along the craquelure of lost leaves,
rising tightly at first in a single plait
before shaking out its winter hair.

Severed from the flint of sparked
stone or better reaped in plain view
with a lens, I think of it as what

passes for benediction; the tenured
door through which seasons pass,
a time-tempered passage, altered

in the balmy stint of its own making—
its own becoming. Or as a stray lamb
bleating in the woods who casts out

a semaphoric hymn beyond its herd.
Somewhere lost among the welcome
arms of the woodland trees I see it,

adrift in a smock of ribbons, and set
amid the downy blueprint of allegory,
charted, in the aftermath of flame.
 

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