in search of a line to begin
a poem, that paces
the same tempo brought on
by blood, the well
turned sun and congeal
of mud after rain.
You reach for Adler and Freud and
find denouement to match
the purple mouth of sage flowers.
Pam Brown’s suburb is nearer
the first apple buds but no
way to introduce new ground.
A sharp start’s the thing.
Kinnell in the daylight
yes you cling to the parsley
gone to seed, gone to straw
to seas of tea-tree
mulch long drawn over.
But you seek, in a futile scratch,
for a defined patch of verbs
and nouns to match the force
of umber tonics frowned
from the dark ale
and the landscape of a bookshelf
as a blackbird
manages the earth
with a system of overturn,
skirt, overturn.
Glenn McPherson is a Sydney-based writer. He has had poetry published in Meanjin, Cordite, the VC Canberra International Poetry Competition and Longlist Anthology in 2017 and 2018.
