A lake like stew

Your eyes saw colours that your brain could not yet understand

Shades that register only as
shimmers under the skin,
that pulse in the subterranean parts of the body.

Parts reserved for processing things like
opaqueness
and the edges of light.

i counted the cracks
in the windscreen
of our hire car

a landscape
riveted by insect carcasses
powdered
with a film of earth so red
it leaves the taste of rust
in our mouths.

we are children again
melting into the back seat,
the windows rolled down
and i tune the radio
to the frequency of
powerlines and rabbit fences,
the perfect broadcast
for a journey that

starts out with a promise

but quickly becomes
interminable.

it is the fundamental law
of movement
– of course –
to be always not quite there,
and not quite here.

in fact,
the further you follow
the thin white line
the faster
it disappears.

you wanted deliverance
but instead we came
to a ghost town

“home!”
“let me go home!”

some where
the landscape moves so quickly it
interlaces
and you tell me that
this is how you see through time.

i concentrate, staring out the window,
colour pixels
rendered in rose quartz
and honey ant yellow—
those mineral shades that
are always part-way
through some kind of chemical reaction, alchemy.

i let my gaze become unfixed and
think about “continuity”…

our car is always
a movie camera
and each window
the perfect frame.

on this road
there is no beginning and end
and beginning and end,
only the part in the middle,
the part
happening now.

we built tunnels
to the depths
of our bodies

but in that
yellow light
i felt it all
undoing.

there was only
landscape
now
that pastel house
a museum

like the vanishing point
of the road

endlessly
undoing.

we ate Vietnamese food
in the suburb where I grew up
and waited for the panic to stop

it was dawn when you finally came round,
a blue car with the music
turned up

across the road I saw
the colour of our shadows
turn to white.