Not Monbulk !

White borders of Green and Yellow Postcard
mailed to my brother’s market-garden farm
frame a rustic-hilled creek-valley scene,
with near other-side horizons, pointed
up with poplar trees.


Descending stairs of hedges, a farm track beyond
unseen fences, pasture daisies in a land of spring,
centre in on corrugated-iron sheds, -a shed
up on posts - a shearing shed - yards and
outbuildings sloping to a weeping
willow creek.


Rising up this side to foreground a
clean-slate of gravel is a modern road
mailed in bitumen, with a roadside verge
mown to the drop-off of phalaris grasses,
besides which a yellow sports car imposes
before an oversize ‘Welcome to MONBULK’
roadsign on two imposts - without perspective
or vanishing points - with this text writ
across a slate of gravel: ‘Take note Mr K…
This Alfa Romeo could be on
its way to Monbulk.'


In for lunch, my primary-producer brother
studies it with a singular eye that estimates,
the other knowing sights of places where
things belong. The straight row plough-line
of a mind scans for sense of place, searches
all district roads, or else who is placed there …
imagining them as they belong till
they are taken to another place.


Only his brow is furrowed now
by the invisible plough
of rowless crops of question
marks. He considers.
Turns the postcard over.
Reads.

“Dear Mr K…, Your eyes
do not deceive you, Mr K…!”


Stops. Flips the picture back in view.
Flips / Reads on. “This Alfa Romeo
Spider could well be on its way
to Monbulk in Victoria.”


Mr K, my inderacine brother, shrugs
as he throws down the post’s rootless
scrap of a card, and sneers:
“That’s not Monbulk!”


4 May 2005 © Wayne David Knoll
The Cascades, Burleigh/East Monbulk