#2115 - waiting for the city

 

2115

6.287

15.x.25

waiting for the city

ekphrastic for Conrad Martens’ 1848 ‘View of Sydney Cove’

 

with a tethered goat and elsewhere fetch

 

sails impossibly far to be here

but most down

it’s all the forest there is to show

 

the governance of absence made

sandstone, quarried nearby

 

the place revealed as empty

when in fact we have made it that way

 

have emptied it of autochthony

of those who piled the stones

laid mortar

 

disease is invisible

it’s long since

now no sign

 

a world in hemispheres

piled one on another

 

you could call it a pile-on

 

it’s the future washing in

and some we make up

 

there will be much smoke and dung

an age of it

 

for now there’s just one chimney puff

 

a sky so pale clouds hardly show

light gets into all corners

 

it’s Arcady without the trees

a model for the nation-to-be

 

it is a place of leisure

 

the empty centre’s lit as if a stage

(as in for history’s page)

 

with only goat to watch

(and only one of two goats)

waiting for the city

for what’s to happen here

 

foreshadowing’s heavy

 

all things are yet to be new

 

the Bridge is coming

the tunnels

the Metro

 

all this to be read

under an Italian hat in air conditioned shade

in jeans and a t-shirt

sushi for lunch

not three kilometers from here

all as just now foreshadowed

 

in a frame of gilt