There was no place on that plain for a city,
no city can break through the blank of the Black Prairie,
its stiff grass tufted grey and aluminum birds:
a province whose design holds fertile seasons,
black earth, basis for growth: traveller whose approach
bends daylight through ghosts, the reasonable dread,
frontier familiar form, through color without water.

There was no place on that prairie for relief,
until the Blue Marl Lands, relics of ancestors
passed us, belted by rocks, the tribal poles;
tourist, we hunt the past as the farmer hunts rain,
as the manic depressive in tired hunt for equilibrium
hunts sleep, swarm up the totems for a view,
see older beds outcropping, dipping seaward and blue.

There was no room on that road for a shadow.
Far off the sand-hills blew, domes over rock salt blowing
echo slant fields in the colors of winter still,
we pass what obelisks of pioneers, the square hero women
and also settlers who control the language,
riding the content tilting toward, seeing
the coastal plain stand faithful as a wall.

Down-lying, the drowned valleys, the captured streams, the fall
of barrier beach and hills embayed, the red, the orange,
the chocolate, the sulphur, the cuesta yellow.
Profile of waves, a jaw of sand, surface of breakers,
and there the end of the trip, and the five swimmers
finding, dive like spread hand into the lit water
seaming the ocean with silver. Tantrum of light on water.
The ladies watch whose jewels sparkle as they breathe,
the stander in wet boat, his net flinching with fish,
the city at the lagoon, surfboat and speedcar
see the whole country :Snow Mountain, under which leaps the rose,
the tops of ranges where no lazy are,
through Black, Marl, Salt, to coast-lands, vein to vein.

Down-lying, prophetic, the long veins of this land
passing into the sea without a change of slope.
Vein of this land feeding on rest again
eats central freshness, the white implacable root.
Each birth was earned with convulsions, each traveller’s birth
spoke its word every time the tilt was changed.
But the ruined mills, but the ghost-towns, but the gaunt adolescent
shirt-sleeved, torn trouser, before the final beach!
Pathologies of lightnings turn to prose,
broken and jarring forms to peace.
A fugue of landscapes resolved, the hunt
leveled on equilibrium, that totemic head seeing
a natural sleep, a place for people and peace.