like solid lightning.
The large bolts strike with a rumble
and clatter to rest
where they gleam with bravado
at the dispirited winter sun.
The small bolts explode
with a skittering hiss
and trickle down between the bricks,
prodigal drops returning to the watertable.
Cast out from its plastic host,
the ice bears grooved testimony to their symbiosis,
but this testimony concedes to the crafting thaw
a bevel smoother than a human hand could fashion.
Some ice lies clustered on the brick paving
like terra incognita wrought on a vellum map
by the feverish imagination of an Olde World explorer.
Some lies scattered among the purple and white alyssum
in imitation of a Tyrolean spring.
As a breeze releases
the olfactory history of myriad fridge dwellers,
a cloth rings over a wire tray
in a crude arpeggio which segues into
the basso profundo of the resurrection hum.
The cycle begins anew.
The poet wishes to acknowledge The Western Review (Western Australia) in whose pages this poem first appeared.
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