Today the breeze over these plains
can barely shuffle the tokens of gum leaves,
rippling sunlight subtly till their vapors catch
far thoughts of times and places past -
my father's voice declaiming Dylan Thomas.
Clouds rise up behind the clear mountain shoulder.
We drive past the dam and take the grassy path
between a brook
and the valley edge
(lined with those stark white snow-gum gestures, yet
the live boughs their persistent skirts).
Vicissitude of gleams in stream,
pulses of the micro-undulant
trickling existential lullabies.
Swarms of little grasshoppers leap intemperate
from our tread, land comically, wriggle and leap again
all along the way where they lie to sun themselves,
return to 'as we were'.
Mica sparkles in the schist thrust-up in the path,
and in the drying mud of ruts and grass-bare patches.
Paper-daisies throng in occasional congregations;
leggy hawkweed seems to stroll with us,
prevalent all the way.
We lie where the grass path ends
and the brook bubbles out of a dark cleft
over algae boulders where the largest
grasshoppers wet feet, sun bodies.
Let the water sing, in high harmonics
of an immanent doze.
The track climbs a wood to a lookout -
but today is not an uphill struggle.
We lie on the grass where the little bees forage,
here in Elysium.
