Melody Paloma
After Landscape by Martin Harrison
An afternoon slides across bitumen
you or me leaning on the window
watching hills with their skin peeled off
and a band of trucks blinking
until the vibrato of a cattle grid
and low rusted heath
three hours of pulling dust
a break at a dry riverbed
where a Rav4 has spent
maybe three days
pressed against a tree
tyres and roof racks taken
still, there are old movie tickets
and fresh bread in the boot
at the turn off is a submarine
half submerged in dirt
it might be a metaphor
but I decide then not to ask
a dead fox next to two small graves
I’ll hear about them later
the first thing you take a photograph of
is the petrol pump at the station
because all things seem intriguing
when left alone in space
up the hill I remember
to stop moving in straight lines
to find gaps between thorn
let grass break off on socks
I thought it might be nice
to read Landscape
to record it up there
on my iPhone four
a week later in Melbourne
someone tells me of rocks
with tops that burn to black
and keep their colour underneath
but I hadn’t turned them over
or held the cool inside my palm
two goats emerge
over the ridge at sunset
and face west for a while
they move away
with the shadow of a cloud
mimicking a wombat hole
paddocks that change colour
slight slopes shift to clay
and one swift strip of orange
reaching across the range.
Melody Paloma is a Melbourne-based writer currently undertaking her honours year in Creative Writing at RMIT University. Her poetry has been published in Overland, Rabbit and Voiceworks and she was recently awarded the 2014 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets. In 2015 she received a WriCE fellowship and took part in a collaborative residency held in Vietnam. Melody is founder and editor of Dear Everybody (IG: @deareverybodycollective twitter: @deareverybody_), a creative collective facilitating collaboration and creative exchange between artists and writers.
Martin Harrison’s creative and critical work has been hugely influential for me. Martin’s work consistently engages and is bound to place; it speaks with place rather than to it, and continues to ground and encourage my own voice.