PADDOCK
You’ve been watching the dead sugar gum
watching it patiently until you decide to cut it down
then you’re all action.
You traipse through the moonscape about its base
place your hand where the beautiful wood
is oiled and burnished by the necks of cows
choosing a spot for the first bite of the axe.
Eventually the tree collapses into hoof prints
and a brief eruption of twigs then silence.
Birds soon orbit their confusion. Cows stare.
It takes all morning to chop it up into manageable
lengths, leaving behind the branches filled with ants.
They’re not all you’re leaving.
Firewood warms you twice, they say,
three times really, after you barrow
it back across the paddock to the dark verandah
where winter finally moves in the shadows
of what you are preparing to abandon.
- Mark O'Flynn 2011
CRUSHED THUMB
Months past the battered blood
growing slowly from the nail
once crushed beneath the physical logic
of a hammer’s sarcasm,
now lifting, the dusty cuticle peels,
a pistachio shell of flaking blood,
xylem beneath, as the mutant nail
corrupts and rises, a smudge of cracked paint.
Long beyond the memory of iron
all trace gone of the original misdemeanour,
the curse, the shaking fist;
the sucked phalange.
- Mark O'Flynn 2011
