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| Provincial City |
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| Tuesday, 26 February 2008 13:23 | |
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Provincial City by Bruce Dawe Climbing the range your ears pop like champagne and your heart distends with something other than relief. You can smell the peace up here.
The proportion, the narrowness. Traitor, traitor, whines the piano-wire voice as you swing past the Welcome sign To find nothing is changed. Overhead the clouds boil past, low, friendly, meaning no harm. The thunder moving into position Shortly after five o'clock is stolid as a furniture removalist. The lightning jerks its thumb: Over here, Fred. When it rains the gutters run red but it's innocent. Dogs and magpies the red soil stains. In season the currawongs in the camphor-laurels cry like tin-shears. (The jacarandas hang their sheets of blue water in mid-air.) Down James Street the semis hurtle nightly, brutalising through the quiet civilised dark like the Eumenides, or conscience, or history. Here the elderly come to convalesce after life's anxious illness; the young leave daily for the Cities of the Plain where there is work (or the hope of it). On the hillside at Drayton the cemetery glitters like a dream; asterisks of light on the wind-screens of mourners' cars Glint remotely as stars in a heaven-deep well. We will never get there. This is a city which is all present: It moves, but oh so slowly you would have to sleep years, waking suddenly once in a decade to surprise it in the act of change. Saturday night, in the main street kerb, the angle-parked cars are full of watchers, their feet on invisible accelerators, going nowhere, fast.
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| Last Updated ( Saturday, 08 March 2008 23:42 ) |