Harvester
By Isi Unikowski
The car’s dorsal wave carves off
a place neither here nor there, the highway’s
undertow drags at the details:
threshed from their commerce, tricked
by that binocular oscillation
when neither foreground nor background prevails
into shapes elemental as furniture
in a house where we lived as children
cabins rust in their dewy lineaments
their bulk emerging broad-backed like cattle
at dawn, knife guards and rasp bars
dragged from their gifts
augers forget their future harvest
conveyer chain a tilde over
their stilled senescence. Only
the gatherer belt insists on a fit
purposive as a flint chip.
Cockatoos kaleidoscope
in frantic tessellations
beneath morning’s cellophane moon,
white on grey swerving over
the pallid paddocks wheeling
white against grey
as if the high cloud
had been shredded
by the landscape’s languid gestures
as if, in knowing the sun,
its light a pinpoint on the cutter bar,
a chorister’s high note, it will always
in the world’s impassiveness
shine through