The Table Lands And My Wife

I lay on my back in peridotite,

a mantle rock of the table lands

in Gross Morn National Park.

Above me on either side, pink hills,

naked as anything sterile could be,

beside me, a few little alpine flowers,

a stream babbling within spitting range,

the sky, a vast blue with altocumulus,

the chit chit of a sparrow, or something,

and then the sound of my wife talking,

to me, unseen behind rose boulders,

part of the meagerest, Precambrian beginnings:

landscape, soundscape, lifescape, the world.