Anne Kellas

. . .

Not the only pebble on the beach.
Plenty more fish in the sea.

Choice overwhelms us.
Whom shall we choose
to overthrow?
Here comes Apocalypse
in a chariot of brown cloud
rolling through the sky.

Run, chickenlittle,
the dice is falling.

. . .

Leaves litter the grasslands
and the scent of a fire hangs in the air.
My teahouse in the mountain's still there,
but the birds have nowhere to sleep.
And the white heat this summer
makes glass, salt and feathers
objects of despair.

. . .

I know
the sound of your footsteps coming for me.
These things make me weep.

. . .

. . .

Insect scrawl lines straightened out by heat
crystalline, hammered
hard
into
gold
thread.

. . .

This age of construction,
metaphysical or otherwise,
fills my universe with noise.
All I want is leaf-litter,
not your swept street scenes.

Leave me.

. . .

Listen, dragon-lily:
Your pollen and your flower festivals
appal me.
Can you hear me searching the fur-lined stems
for water-bubbles
underwater? Nectar-seeking missile beak
curves down the throat of an exotic marigold.
Egyptian worship-lily
stands like an obelisk, idol, naked lady,
fruitless, dying for beauty.
Second life is hard to penetrate
with wings that deflect the sheen of rust
But in heaven, my wings will scatter you with angel-dust.
Take that to your avatar.
A tall white vase for your perfect flower,
my funeral pyre.

. . .

Stranded on a cobbled beach,
with the rising of the sea,
your dreams sink away . . . Just the contents
of the psyche
spilling over the dam wall
and flooding thought with mantra, syllable
and patterns built of fours and square roots of two,
insisting.      All this carried on in silence
behind your smiling eyes.
They say that under pressure from the heat of bushfires,
the tarmac melted, became a kind of lumpy shelter
for starfish. Something flashed there, iridescent purple, like glints in velvet
in the light of your torch.
But you know so much more than me about why they are here
and what their markings mean, and how some are dotted,
and some have solid lines. The lesser roads
had no margins
but the larger ones were known to carry massive loads.
Now once again, something's torn,
and in the way of natural adaptation,
my brain finds new avenues for sea traffic,
useful channels for the shoals of fish
that crowd the shallow waters,
asking for asylum
looking for the soul.

. . .

All these things,
      artifacts, objects
      some of exquisite glass
      patterned with beauty . . .

All our redemptive art
      weighed in the scales
      like a heap of gemstones
      shovelled by the bucket-load
      from a mine in the sky
           not one
           more
           will add
              anything
         to this loss.
You are too far gone into that far country,
rainless,
where time is caught in glass
in spiderwebs of fine print.