Shifting Silage Under a Summer Moon

I am on an island: this speck, my tractor, spills light in a skirt about it:
beneath the footplate it falls like flour from a sieve and sows into the stubble.
A yolk, a bolus almost, is solid in the cup my headlights cut from the dark.
Sitting here behind them is like watching an animal nose about, shoving light.
Out at the farthest reach of illumination it weakens to a mist,
so that what’s out there, the grey paddock, is furred with a nap,
tawny-sable like that of a Burmese cat.

Boulders of feed rear up out of the dark,
like a coast breaking suddenly before you,
their slumped bulk that of a mythic warrior brooding after defeat,
even as under moonlight the plastic wrap glistens wetly, moulded
and nubile—but iridescent-hard too like the bodies of beetles.
Dumped only this morning already they’re monumental: aloof
and proud in their own history.

It’s the thickness—the fermenting, molasses-sluggish, licorice-heady smell
of grass melting in its sugars, the vat-full, brewery-maltiness of it,
along with the boorish persistence of diesel (its stink immediate
and insulting, that same clinical efficiency as chloroform soaking a mask),
which gluts the night air like blood thickening in a drain.

The tractor rages only so far as its headlights. And bullocks into its work.
This little kingdom is as much as you command.
The night brings you everything else, as though it were unfailing host
to a guest come suddenly among its tents.

You learn a new geography. The paddock you swore you could work blindfold
has shifted … And you’re easily lost. Against the glitter-dust of stars
what you’ve known as landmarks gesture and menace like silhouettes
in a shadow-play of another culture. Everywhere shadows of trees, rocks,
like oil stains on a tablecloth, watermark the moon-white earth.
Sometimes another darkness—then a flash, a stare—cold, opalescent green
or red flaring. A blink, duck, bob, slink, lope, a scurry. And jinking: nothing.

And learn how another climate works: the air flowing like creeks;
the mother-comfort, cosy wrap of it, then a baptismal plunge
into a musk of mould and humus which pools in bog-cold pockets;
in the released scent of things, the rust-cumin and pepper-spice of earth,
the disinfectant eucalypt, the sloping of country—from one smell to the next.

Earlier there were birds, their cries weaving nests above where they were to roost,
squabbling like voices from crowded tenements. Now, hear crickets,
their skritch a run of fine cracks; the earth give and creak,
readjusting, like a chair settled into.
And be taught how the moon in its passage forms from the night a day
that’s as supple as well-oiled leather, comfortable, flexed, easy in its clothes.

It is true: it is coldest before dawn, before the tearing of darkness into scraps—
the reappearance of clouds filling with substance—even the racy cirrus ones,
combed-wet, now drying, streaming thinly as the hair of girls escaping on a Harley.
This paling into light, its anaemic pink and yellow, has the melancholy
you recall, of leaving a childhood bedroom before returning to school.

Approaching the house, its small hunched darkness like a stone,
is to feel the weight of a stone. Self-absorbed, it is alien in the new light.
Closer, it smells heavy with complication. And you, like a traveller returning,
accept that that other country, well, it was another country,

though getting down at the gate you breathe what lifts from the mown paddock
and wish, as you did as a child, you could live out under a sky
as fragrant as the idea of India, among the brilliance of stars,
on your island of light
and not have to stop.