Others advertise Tidy Towns awards
from twenty years ago.
An Avenue of Honour

a General Store that does pizza
Thurs.–Sat. only. An outsider
with some local credibility

I take directions from gravel roads
and end up at a Lutheran church
on a back road graziers can get to.

In Mt Eccles National Park
I listen to water drip in a cave
and gain a sense of being entombed

by familiarity the world forgetting
you ever existed like watching Sky Channel
in an empty bar. A tourist

in the town you grew up in
drawn to midday stillness
a questioning breeze, as if, as if.

What holds an elderly woman
crossing the highway with her list
and yellow plastic shopping basket?

Leaving town a man collecting wood
gives me a hard look. A woman does the rounds
of her lawn on a ride-a-mower.

Farms are abandoned as the bachelors die off.
Pine and Blue gum plantations are moving in.
Mt Napier’s cone can be seen from all directions.