At six-thirty a.m.
I drive the back road
from Shoalhaven Heads to Berry,
winding past Seven Mile Winery,
the bronze-yellow scarring
the ocean's line of horizon,
past the bed and breakfasts,
round the sweeping bend
of Far Meadow,
avoiding the potholes
that like a cancer refuse to be mended,
watching the bleeding sky behind
turn milk-white ahead,
past Rumbles Earthmoving,
the fiery clusters of the coral trees
lining the road,
to the left, towards Nowra,
orange lights of homesteads
marooned deep in the steaming vale,
the mill-smoke drugged and white,
suspended in air,
the near cows like monuments
in the low-level mist
probed here and there
by a scalpel blade of sun,
over Broughton Creek bridge
drowning in its image,
the skin of the water unblemished
but for a solitary duck
cutting a lesion from the farther reeds,
past the old Creamery,
a lone jogger exhaling the vapour
of his smouldering pain,
and over the crossing
to the station: and my three hour train ride
to where the specialist at her city desk
prescribes for me another, unfamiliar
road I'm now on.