Amnesia

Love could be constant, with a changing object, or leavequietly, like a shy man, embarrassed by his axe. A

shepherd might know every sheep for years and thenstop, realising that sheep embodied his feeling; now that

is the egotistical sublime, and launches a major mode ofpoetry. Violins play for the vanquished trees, the calves

that seemed like princes last year already ground todeath, we'd guess. A shepherd becomes lost in Sydney

signs petitions against a cull, an organ harvest; looks foranother shepherd, or sheep in Martin Place. Among

florists, buskers, discreet smokers, he sees no kindredsoul (though he notes their perfect places on the

spectrum, which seem so meshed until enlarged. He hadan introduction, parties with wasted neighbours). Now

he's forgotten why he's there. A voice rescues himsaying they know a goat sweeter than a BBC ingénue

that can sing like a thousand litres of milk. Where thisquiet voice came from—out of rosebud or violin—is not

the point: we know who it is. Floating against the fire ofthe sky, like a sheen of show bubble, he sees the souls

of a thousand lambs on their way to heaven, and followstheir direction. He left the dabbing crowd behind him. It

must've been him that shrugged off the fence post theyfound, and who dropped the two-thousand-year-old shoe

A head full of insects like a saint perhaps, whipping him-self about the head, to quiet flies and friends into prisms