When lights black out
a universe expands and
there's room to think
about this delta of light
where the living mangrove
struggles to be heard.

Listening, I just make out
form's whispered statement -
old conflict love returning.
Tide rises like full moon
egrets break into running
sky, dawn paint dripping,

alarum of clocks and cacophany
of voices startled into life. Easy.
To swing these legs to earth. Stretch
pain of spine and shoulder into shirt
until I resemble myself. Almost
myself in everything I do

this could be my last day on earth.
It's geography. The storyteller radio
leaves shapes at the back of my mind
like Kimberley cave drawings
from another waking time - serendipitous
the way things, sounds, become self.

The children have made their own
breakfast. The politics of interaction
always already in place, mobile,
telephonic, sonically constant
even when the TV is off. A dial tone
like school when everyone's in class

suggests its own kind of silence. At best
I listen, not making out what's being said
or whether it's being said for me. But I seem
to know when my turn has come. To feed,
to shower, to shit and shave, not necessarily
in that order. The music goes along

as ordinary as toast. Or a bus ride
into town. And for the best part
I give the best part of myself
to the chemistries of work:
measure the gait of each gesture
coming and going, for a sign of tide

and its passes, eyes turning always
to the blackout horizon, and the bell
of knockoff time. With word and action
I am surrounded, only utterance
or gesture make sense, or the daily touch
of planets: horoscopes fuse past with

future, signal the present's resolve
to wait for something to happen.
In fantasy spaces I test daydream
against the physical limitations of paper,
wood, metal, flesh and the cosmos
ripples up my spine, like waking

when you're needed. I can feel
the world in my legs as I walk
the long corridor home. The shops
wait for me to pay. The houses
wait for me to pass. The children
wait for me to play. And my wife

home also from her long journey
through light, waits for recognition.
You can only be you. It adds up. The brief
affirmation of something small
and atmospheric, moving between
speech and sound, in your own space

where the planet moves neither fast
nor slow, announces your arrival.
The anatomies of Substance provide
maps, and opportunities too; biology
mutates and clones, and I might hunger
for something more than what I resemble.

On Death's assembly line anything is possible.
And now I lean into sunset and
landscape on back verandah, meal
grumbling in my stomach, cold beer
in my hand, seduction of aromas near
and volatile, Venus rising gently

from her chair to be closer to my study
of the stars. And when we look intimately
into each other's eyes, there's a knowledge
of the things we resemble, a strange
recognition which we recognise
for the truth of each other. But this is not

Romance. It is the gravity of stars
which pulls us together, combines charts,
electrical storms in the brain, and for a moment
we think everything is OK. Then the blackout
horizon looms, gigantic over the mangrove
of love turning into living night, immense

and undefineable as a dream
beside this codex of misunderstanding,
a mis-en-scene for something else,
something larger and brighter than
the possibility of us standing now
on the verge of the ineffable.