White Car in McCahon Country

In five oclock flatness
the low-lit greens are levelled.
Issueless glimmerings
greying and paling
against the mapscape.

In the small bird’s eye, light
has not eased and draws the edge,
its wire, austerely scraping
a distant car
across the raised patina of hills.

On the enammelled
outer shell, thin calligraphies
of streaked drops
rewrite the outbound eye’s flight

down toward
the narrow minded road, its pinprick
of attentiveness
closing in on the pupil
with a white hum. Without resistance it

back-feeds the awning,
river-coloured sky,
to microscopic size, a buzzing
among the churn of white silt
in the core of a single flower,

anonymous in wider shot
among the whole reproductive frost
crusted like ash
on the low roadside branches,

and almost dragging down to water
their blank speculations
mirrored in river.

There is no music,
only this white tone, as the writing
winds back to the mouth.
No animal breaks the roadlines

and the driver, lulled
to a droop, will not stir the surface
will not hatch from the egg,
but be dissolved instead

unborn into its reflected
landscape, its lightbleed
fed by the churn
of a greywhite sky,

where through blurred loopings
of rain the sharp
binary of mountain’s edge
meets the white

of imageless distance.