Thursday, 8 August 2013

Leaf (August)



 
The silver filigree veins of the brooch on the black lapel of the woollen coat of the woman standing at the red light remind him of satellite photographs of river deltas sparkling in the sun, but they he she they must walk.

The pamphlet for the pancake place handed out by chattery teens all play and watchfulness is scrunched up and scurrying away from the wind tunnel of the law-abiding street named after an obscurely Victorian empire builder.

The little flags that signalled summer and kept their nations alive above the fray are sludge in gutters, losing the forms that are the form of the tree today, the repetitions of those little flags barely a thought beneath the bark.

The portable cladding, layer over layer, seam against seam, rivet beside rivet, ascends each side of the skyscraper, light shifting the shading like a precious jewel, whether in cloud or bleak sunlight, except there seems to be a loose one.

Commuters on the viaduct turn the next page to find she has chosen a new life one she could only have now, while the judge two-dimensional in his one page summation found him guilty as charged, and other stories seen from both sides.

On unseen walls of a side-lane lot in the midst of the commercial towers the infomercial district of the city of closed-off vistas, the broadsheet posters of circus nightclubs and egomania rock bands wrinkle with the rains.

The spreading plane trees outside the casino are bare as their root systems down in the Birrarung earth, yet at the ends of a few east-end branches flutter the last of the big brown signs of life, about to blow into the river at the next insistent breeze.


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