The cosmos is only organised in parts; the rest is cinders
         T.E. Hulme

1. And their lord said: WORK
         &
         AFTER-
                    WARDS
REDEMPTION

2. Something like a dumb mouth from which all
the teeth have been extracted …

The inner spirit of the world is a billion
cubic tonnes of contaminated earth -

stripped back, mined, blackened
by fire: the dark cut of a gross

excision, black outcroppings, a shadow
advancing towards the light

like an unbodied intelligence
with no more judgement than its shadow

3. Overland by means of the rote eye - a continuous
filament threading the delirious, outlying places:
the pattern of their condemnation and
wreckage - and the figures that inhabit them
turned to glass, refined to an elemental leanness.

Their flatness becomes an expansive seeing -
a distance approached obliquely: there is not one
surface, one thought … The folding mirrors
in which nothing resembles the exact eye
angrily refused or cast aside to seek other affinities.

The upward sky casts the first shadow of day
solid as a stone concourse - mythical ruminations
of a truth told in ancient mariner language.

In time this too becomes the frail totem of conscience
a disintegrating voice and all it stands for -
as though a threat could make it fall to pieces

4. History cannot see them here -
                  fearing a little the
stupidity of being
lost - limbs move and flex
in a landscape that doesn't exist
until we invent it.
                  A judicious choice of
illusions, each
sentence and each pause, expansive
and hollow - safety in
listening:
                  slow ruminations
of the earth-compound (the need
to enclose a meaning
within it) and the wind, its in-
visible substance, carrying on the
rote task

5. How it occurs, gathering distance between
dusk and man being in the dark -
renewal of a timeless vigilance turned
once again eastwards. The road
follows in a straight line to its last
visible point - we move between one
and the other as between two unlikelihoods.
An abject and ridiculous headlight
peering into space or the importuning
static of a dead transistor, zeroing-out -
is admission of no fault but a
warning that all remains under sentence
until the stated arrival, or only as long
as we keep to the definite purpose in view

6. Time fallen between two
stones - the glass is
broken, a hole
made in the oval case, the

minute-hand
crushed.
Envisage
its disintegration

backwards
from the end to its
genesis - shrivelled
in the centre of the rock

7. Ungainly as the skull
of an exposed
skeleton - eye
holes plumbed with long-
discarded memories
"where justice
is naked," a bore-pump
shunting in the wind
under a broken
windmill. The scavenged
machine-innards,
ribcage and coiled wire
and red dust
sifting outwards at
slow intervals
and the spirit-level
building and
building up
and sloughed mud
stinking surfacewards

8. Why is the line drawn exactly there?
An engine's worn-out teeth - the wind
in its jaw's saw-
toothed grimace: a voice
in the wind, that keeps true
to the old promise; a voice
inside radio static
parsing the signal commands? Its self-
devouring momentum
and look of its one blank eye - hung from nothing
over the camel-track from Birdsville to Maree
seeking the great god

It is a reptile-clutching at each sound
like a mind
shrivelled, nerves flexing under
mineral duress
                  listening
for the cry and the stillness
before rain - first felt
                  not seen not heard

The pain and the ecstasy of its repetitions
increase - a ridge cutting the space in
two, its vast Ur-
mass listing under sky
on steel tracks
and gradually forming an
idea of something far off, remote
as night-vision above the
Hindu Kush
signalling with code, hieratic figures,
caves, hidden people, or

the mythical eye of a whale
staring from a dry lake bed -
salt cataracts whitening
over it - crank-shaft
and drill-bit coupling down
into the exhumation.
                  The same eye the same
                  exhausted intelligence
                  lacking further alibi