Reaching Bedrock 

Auburn, Sydney. 14.1.2000
for Harry and Lucy

SWEET Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting summer’s lingering blooms delay’d.

Oliver Goldsmith, Tahe Deserted Village

Past the Turkish pizza and video shops
and the slow-paced women in head scarves,
past the citadel of units, out of scale with
your hot street, grass verged and wrought with iron.

We wait in air-conditioning watching the pilot
of Lost in Space. There’s no Dr Smith
just wholesome cowboys wandering a moral maze,
dressing monkeys as aliens and killing Cyclops.

I open the gates so Sue can back their car,
guide a neighbour out of the way. ‘Been
run over twice,’ he mumbles, then rambles on
‘the pirates are coming,’ demented from the drink.

The Botanic Gardens are Sunday-busy,
we find a hill with shade overlooking ‘the billabong’
and picnic while geese honk, chase each other
and race either side of a low wooden fence.

Harry and I spot a peahen trailing five spotty chicks
who whistle when we draw too close,
the women have found a red-bellied black
slithering on the edge of the site that backs onto

Duck River and a series of parks before you hit
the Clyde railway yards, Silverwater prison
and the industrial complex, smack in the centre
of a poisonous city sprawling west into the Mountains.

The kids head for the stepping stones, walking on water.
The ‘Pool of Reflection’ floats florid blue water
on a blue backdrop, Vietnamese wedding parties
are being processed and recorded a thousand times.

Back for afternoon tea behind the Federation house
in a garden rippling with corners, Tradascentia snakes
out towards the slide Lucy wants dusted of cobwebs
and spider skins before she’ll demonstrate the art of falling.

Harry has climbed the ancient plum tree
withered and twisted as a mountain pine,
potato vine coils around with small white flowers
for barbs. He clambers down and swings

a geologist’s hammer onto brick, smashing
the mould, then pounds the shards
to rusty sand, our constituent pieces.
He wields a tool to reach bedrock but

there’s no such thing, only ways of being
in an environment. The Robinsons in space
pioneer every ecological niche, introducing
overly active imaginations and oversized boots.

If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say, ‘This is simply what I do’.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 217