from Totem Poem [Abandoned in a field near Yass]

Abandoned in a field near Yass a cobwebbed car once kept us warm
and when it rained, though we shivered with sickness,
there came a moment of perfect happiness, faces nestled
in the vinyl, sleep coming on, surrounded by metal
that in upcoming decades would oxidise to flakes.
 
Asleep at last, last of the valium, we came to know
a car too is a flower and pollen its decay.
In the dry air at dawn the cicadas kept still. The space
that mass sat in decided how mass was to move.
We dreamed of valleys of olive trees, silver side out.
 
The lions preened. We shivered with need.
A mechanic showed me once how the spark-paths from spark-plugs
looked, if you looked close enough, like mountain ravines
from the air. The deeper the groove the faster
the current. We shivered, this our habit, this flowing.
 
It takes the breath away. There are gum trees crackling from it
two decades later. I slept so still beneath that mass of dreams
like sediment compressed beneath a lake. I woke and the
tributes and glory were gone and the crops all withered
and money was merely the index of anxiety.
 
When we realised this our hearts swelled in exultation.
Even time would forget there was reason for fear: that decay
seemed to will itself upon us. I was off the air, delirious
with substance. The kite hawks grew ashamed.
All nature squirmed. I was off the air, light-headed with voracity.
 
The theme just kept repeating itself, year in year out,
same demon different bodies. A nurse said When you stay,
when you leave those wet imprints in our airspace,
these sheets smell like formaldehyde, like death. We had merely
reached early, down the end of the river, the leprosarium
 
of feeling, and all things stood for every other thing,
creepers, vines, tendrils, anacondas, inert surrender,
such listlessness, and yes the very rage with which
we chased the very forms of it, the lineaments
of nothingness, the powders of the comatose, the bliss.
 
This was the state of the world. Heading backwards we learned
the flea-fish was the smallest animal before the insect kingdom
began. Forwards, there were only the sudden deaths
of galaxies. And yet when we practised love there seemed
on certain days an awful lot of space; and so much sky.
 
Never had I lain then at Kangaroo Valley so comfortable
in my own body. A virtual flatness and that centrifuge
in the stomach stilled and my spine a spirit-level. The smell
of coffee drifting in brought back to me that lily-white girl and that
sad hour of need. How brittle every bone was then. How
 
could one not be completely bedraggled by time or compulsion or
duplicity? I was all those things and am. I was so tired
with the not-being-here inside of it all that fatigue
was like oxygen, given of all the givens, sensurround
of the gods. But I was gulping and heaving by then.
 
And that is all so long ago. Though when you forget
the last time: most likely it is not the last time.
And when dreams don’t come, when mastodons and minotaurs
curdle in the night-reaches and the bulls lie fallow
in dawn-sweats: sleep some more. Wait. Sleep on. And swim.