Late October afternoon enjoying a beer while looking to the garden from the sunroom

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.