imagining something more be-ribboned, be-jingled;
silk-nomadic, spice-romantic; before the wire had entered
their consciousness and rooted them to the weeds.
One of the early escapees came back after twenty years and said:
We never envisaged fences. But this place has changed since they first came
with their fingered scraps of eighteenth century imaginings:
where the sun used to hit the moss on the back of our house in the afternoons,
there’s a bare willow, possum-ravaged and winter-ugly;
puzzling areas of vacant grass are portioned off, like exercise yards for lost hopes,
with exhausted chickenwire fencing, rusted star-pickets, collapsing garden splints.
The old-timers could have told us the stakes were too high.
This is chickenwire land: every struggling patch and desperate scratch
tangled in messy manacles of the stuff, and every grey corner and upright post
buttressed with filigree collars like the token neck-irons of a long-extinct chain-gang.
Even those secret little plots of sweet death sitting up in the bush
have a heavy ration of wire, left behind after every desperate harvest
for children in a hundred years to wonder at the quaintness,
like the old still they talk about found amongst the snaky tussocks.
Sometimes it’s all the old hippies move for: to tend their ganja plots,
their paranoias cycling like mould spores, with the seasons;
while they wait indoors, painting eyes,
their heavy-boned dogs heckling at neighbours, their grown children watching
from the dark wedges behind windows, like Boo Radleys with dreadlocks.
A survivor who lived here as a child has gone to the city to be a sculptor in wire.
She makes genuflecting forms to hang in the corners of bright airy flats,
where they hover toward the light; and angels climbing up the corners
of vacant rooms with ever such transparent wings.
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