48:4 Winter 2002/3

Peter Minter

SUPER GEORGIC

1.
The dream begins here
again, on a Good Day, where light
whittles up hands' gold

With the sun's impressive keep
& we drive down through plains
of heavy wheat, green

Movement rapid as the sky
scatters thinning pairs of wedge tails,
white butterflies and monarchs

Like meteors polarising slow.
Half way to Lake Grace, where
red creeks fan congealed

Through seed type pyrography
we are silently overawed by their future,
stop for fuel and wait

& feel amongst cumulate
memories of grass
parrots' bright, temporary dilations

Feedback coil centrifugally,
the drive's momentum
emptying the earth like a satellite

Glinting just overhead
scanning atmospheric temperature gradients
as the day glows out, condenses

To an orbital heap
our bodies as they leak a suspension
of fine gold dust, saliva, and truth.

2.
Regular spirits lack such
grandeur, interpenetrate neurons
with the quietest illusion of hills

Spun out by the Servo's
rising thermal register, a brooding canopy
spread thin

As dusk's panorama slices
hover, anodised & synched
clear around the 'Gas' sign's

Halo budding
red over roadside sunflowers. Thunderheads
raise incarnadine

Into dark blue waste, reactivate
restlessness, Chapter 24 calibrating phenomenal
tension on the tape-deck

As the fuel pump kicks in
& the counter collapses to zero. So
unpredictably y'know

Death skates around motive,
your white hot surface, loose fumes
break eruption

In the flow
& science of your restive game--the burning
matches flick & arc

strobing off the scent
of Super, the quick prophets at the nozzle
pitching nets

To take them out
just in bloody time. Until the components
of pleasure erupt.

3.
At the moment of deoxygenation
I calmly carry on, trace
phosphorescent smoke hanging

As the tank fills up
life's short vault
elementally cracked

To a resemblance of stars'
faint exposures
spread & curve wide as a future,

The entropic luminescence
of each short flame
& fuel mix ballistic as air

Makes total sense of air, almost
glacial, the vista seismic.
Lungs gap suppresses

Sheer distance & the plain
hills are alive with the sound of jackhammers.
You keep spinning matches

Into dark chimeric tremors
as a white tailed dunnart springs
burning from your fingers

In a ball of fiery, concentrated blood
& your cranium is wrecked
by the crystalline astringency of seeing,

For just a moment, fuel erupt
along a precipice of salt, cavernous sirens
bursting middle-class estates

All choric over lawns &
Super-Realist-like, a vision of Europe 'n' America,
dehydrated, carbonaceous & flash.

4.
We trade on inanimate matter,
drive further into wilderness, silos
rapidly fabricating

Lightning ribbed as a dark glitter
in our vacuumous wake or, what plastic covers,
the mystery transacted

With ruinous composure, the brief
sonic boom radiant over damp night grain,
then left circling the crops.