Sunset in the valley,
which is still sometime away

from “official sunset,”
this inland of an earlier

nautical twilight;
but at the fastigium

of the dead central limb
of a York gum

at the southwest corner
of the red shed,

Not frequent, the monitors of doomed pastoral
admit these native moths their autumn rising

after a sleepy eviscerated summer, stubble
suddenly alive with beakiness, and then and then . . .

 

Sawdust soaked in kerosene,
storm-fallen wood, ash-flurries
over the stoked bed of a dead fire.

Like monks tunneling into desert
mesas, a vibrant hermitage surrounded
by a moat of sand, rats have tunneled