Swarm of Blue Dots

She grew up beside a beach,
collected pippi shells
and bleached coral worn
into animal shapes,
waited for countless tides
to make sense of rockpools

Endurance divided into living
is carving a hollow
in the side of yourself
and filling it with whatever you can find
to see you through desire
and time

What is the name of that tree
with the fulsome leaves
she asks herself so many mornings?
Is it a lush forest of giant
greenery she thinks
she is waiting for?

Waiting is like gardening
at the edge of a wilderness:
beautiful ideas that might exist
are unreachable
but for occasional seeds
that she grows in pots on a shelf

There’s an abstraction
about waiting, a chain of poems
without endings: she goes shopping
and she waits, walks the dog
and waits, watches a pink sun
evaporate beyond a plateau.

The lilly-pillies are growing
in a savage heat that skipped
spring while light mirrors back
and forwards via the moon,
words faintly visible
in swarming blue dots of love
that fade and brighten

View from the Spa

After the drum of night rain there’s only tree fern talk
            in the arm of morning.  Sometimes she imagines the reverse- 

rain clouds with lilac gums sucking hard facts until they
            dissolve. She sees more clearly in the warm water of this ceramic

spa, an egg perched in its eyrie high on this island forest rise.
            She is undetailed, undescribed, reshapeable, ripe for newness

Vivid against the palette of sun, an iridescent beetle perches
            on her wrist. Ideas burst like fruit, like sky pineapples.

Distant cabin creatures creep—the largest, praying mantis teal
            arching it’s overcarriage—the green train of dawn whispers

along a jetty with fish darting beneath—slick silver imaginings,
          rememberings—a horizon of time to grow familiar with what’s new

What We Won’t Know

Abundance is everywhere, grassheads heavy with seed,
millions of tiny discs shining on the surface of the lake like starbursts.

In the shadows, at the edges, small brown ducks drift,
smudges of ink on watery fingers. The house of poetry

has walls in colours yet to be named: perhaps love is soft moss
underfoot, without slipping, the deepest green?

Dusk is the cool rich blue of pollinators after their day of creating.
Cuckoos drift across stippled cloud, their sky path recorded

on the surface. In the future, will their feathers be planted,
grow in the soil? Will the horses that drank here

have the faces of ferns? I’m eager for autumn’s quiet kindness
after a year without seasons, of scorching heat.

One day, we will look outwards together in the same direction
so give words to me. I don’t want anything else in your absence.