it looks hopeless
on the flip: the forest, the hurled world overhead
its falling horizon clearly inserted beyond immaculate.
Under the derelict sky a dynamo skews through
landscape sharpening the sun. I breathe a nowhereness
familiarity removed. In the lost figure of myself
we are marked as random and excessive. This is not
how you look at a lake.
You were the nearest
to real in my life. Now volatile currents haze the wind,
blackened columns replace eucalypts and intermittent
chemical-flare enters our breathing. The gaze’s touch
is distraught over charred ground, body-clutter,
animal truth. We fight against corrosion, silt tongues
learning a swallowed language. It is a bleak corridor
lined with condolence.
And here’s the thing
sometimes you can’t read a passage through for
creeping erasure, economic grasping, ourselves.
Mirrors fold, hollow against many enclosures, as we look
elsewhere for an exit. Emotion, concealed maybe.
A place only in my mind, where still there is an idea
of returning.
_______________
Angela Gardner has six poetry collections including Some Sketchy Notes on Matter, Recent Work Press, 2020 shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award and the Thomas Shapcott Prize winning Parts of Speech, UQP, 2007. Her verse novel The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette, Shearsman, was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year, 2022.
This poem was selected by Anthropocene Guest Editor Tom Branfoot.
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