(for David Baxter)

1. Five days backtracking through outcountry - what
would it be like arriving at conclusions?
A stand of dead mallee where runoff from cotton
irrigation marks the boundary; a flock
of parrots swimming in white dust. Metaphor
is what beginning and ending is, fallen asleep on the side
of a road. Kafka's a bird went in search of a cage
replays on the interior message machine. Picture
a city of uncompleted selves, somewhere
in the Mitteleuropa of the mind. "Life is purgatory."
Hand-in-hand and hand-to-mouth - waking
with the taste of all tomorrow's cigarettes. I sit
in a state of grace behind the wheel ponderously
factoring distances. the image of a fleeting landscape
is neither a labyrinth nor a mask; it's only an image

2. A cramped jawbone endlessly ruminating proofs:
barbiturate roadhouses, truckstops, the crossborder
night-run from Mildura to Lightning Ridge. Ghost-
towns populated with black ghosts. Our delirium
has failed and each human destiny must be judged
by what it has harmed; refining the endless
white lines of the law in hand-me-down propria
persona. We cut the seeing eye from its frame:
all else withers. In thirteen years I too will be
unbodied intelligence, Quasimodo. The damage will
never have been enough. Fazing out in moonrise
over the silent diggings' ruined opalescence. A man
could be buried here, left for dead, and never know