5. VICTORIAN IRONBARK
victorian ironbark, a clue to gold found in gold country, it has very dark bark,
rough, persistent and fibrous on the lower parts of the trunk
and slate green leaves to make your hands old before their time,
leaves that look young on bark that looks ancient,
leaves as though they have just been splashed by rain,
victorian ironbark, displays its unrelenting side to the unrelenting sky,
in irregular scales becoming shaggy and darker, courser with age,
interlocking grain channels of deep still wood, remote from the leaf's edge in,
my hard bright eye bores deep into the resistance of the tree, there is no weakness here,
it is the durable tree of miles of lonely fencing, of railway sleepers sleeping,
on gently sloping foothills, well drained skeletal soils and flats near watercourses,
victorian ironbark, begins thin, ends thin, prominent and black,
straight up and down as it faces you, in the frost or in the heat,
no mucking around, no curves about it, its voice is gravely quartz,
it retreats further inland to sandy loams, heavy alluvial soils, alluvial plains,
even with the softening of your eyes, the temporarily vulnerable part of you,
you are simply staring into wood as deep as silence, nothing underneath, no hard shell,
the australian environment has shaped me into what I have become,
that is ironbark, deeply furrowed, inwardly fueled and smouldering,
often nothing but the land made wind, with heat to blow the ash along my rim |
