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  • Suddenly, Trees
  • Martin Harrison (bio)

A precipitation— August's light rain falling invisibly through the middle of the night— did I hear it? did I dream it?— a slash or drift of it back of the mind, in the middle of sleep, unheard, unknown, not even heavy enough to play on the tin and wake me

There all the same, in the morning (yes, the cold silver morning I run towards) hanging in drops along nude, thin arms of those wide-spreading American locust trees —in summer, they dance with fan-like leaves cascading greenness over spiked branches and trunks— but now they carry water hanging in well-spaced droplets along bare branches, shining winter crystals against the brown paddocks, globules fixed there like squirts of transparent glue

(a previous owner planted them as part of some plan for shade-trees and orchards never realised— a few are left here by the side of the house, awkward and out of place, too strong, too refined to grub out) [End Page 96]

I'm just walking down the verandah, looking back at the paddock, the trees— those wide American locusts— already forgetting the rain diamonds' luminosity as they catch 8 a.m.'s broken light stretched out over glowing earth— suddenly thinking what it would be like to have seen this just at the point of having died, to have had this moment of insight, of thought— then to have gone away— glancing each thing in its passage, as the light, the water, the bare trees themselves glance out to me

Martin Harrison

Martin Harrison is the author of the collections of poetry Music (Vagabond Press, 2005) and Summer (Paper Bark Press, 2001), which was short-listed for the nsw Premier’s Literary Awards and won the Wesley Michel Wright Award. His recent collection of essays is Who Wants to Create Australia? (Halstead Press, 2004). He teaches poetry and poetics at University of Technology in Sydney and lives in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales.

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