We have set beasts up and walking but no
one is paying notice to the trample. They lift
whole train sleepers like toothpicks and interrupt
train services for hours; like coins
of resplendence, brains of Byzantine, or the fisherman’s
knot. Beasts up and walking feast on the written recipe,
yet the home cooks bereft of their preparations
heeding nix of danger gloat over a gist of the imbricated stages,
such as the proportions of water to flour. Glue, they keep
making sopping glue, running like tears. The bugle
is a whimpering sand bubbler, one of a fortune. It
heralds the beasts’ success at disappearance not
a telephone peal disturbs. We think to go trampling,
but only ourselves do we maim. Train sleepers
snap our fingers; trains dash our tunnel vision.
Yet, some canny person has piled gravel and rubble
into cairns, silent bugle threnodies choke in our dead
throats. Tiny bubbles retreat from our cairns carrying
the songs that map the trampled landscapes. Thus,
there are only the beasts to sing to from our invisible
reed exhausts guiding air bubbles skyward.

Corey Wakeling lives in Melbourne. Published in journals here and abroad, he has work appearing in Famous Reporter and Australian Book Review

© Adam Formosa
Overland 203-winter 2011, p. 75

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