Here. Touch my moving 

Tram door—feel the 

Heat and noise of day. Feel your fingers, granules against a

Rough and rusted world.

 

A thin sheet of steel—ragged

Shaking.

Sixty k’s an hour clanging softly over

May.

 

I am swinging, briskly against a tumbling,

Breaking tide.

Scratch. Scrape;

Tin foil shudders as we

Brake and shimmy into Bungendore. 

 

Back.

Back towards felled eucalypts lining.

Desert tawny.

The newest crimson dragon flies from one street to another 

With a cry.

 

International;

Globality, and the transfer of 

ah, wo hao, ni hao—

Gong xi fa cai; we import culture too

As bao buns and soy sauce .

Cross-country race by carnival days and once barren

Wastelands now a 

Melting cooker of hot-pot stew.

 

I am back home in a 

Smog.

Suddenly—thirty-two nights without seeing a star

Bright shining, good luck, good luck for me.

 

Cai are the riches littered on restaurant tables

Pebbles far in on the Qingdao sea . . .

When we swerve past a bridged sallow forest on an economy

Return train to Kingston shores,

I pull towards the dirty

Windows, and look above the

Sky.

 

In this city of ruffled lakes and Telstra Tower 

Mourning gums and Singaporean nights,

Gucci uni t-shirts and nameless skyscape lights;

I see mushroom grandmothers cracked-tooth grin and yawn their backs

Fuschia flower blouses, bamboo canes and Zimmer frames

Off the 343, watch it waddle into the day.

I stand on the central 

Paved, paving stone

Carving roads and turning myths

And we are all there—

Congregated, solemn, dancing, ones by ones and eights by eights, on this

Single. solitary

Point.