A tree makes a pattern on the sky
as night arrives:
it is a billowing blackness
that sinks in the mind,
slow to speak, because deep in the impression of its shape,
taking root, as anything
inscrutable does,
like the jet trail of a dream or the scene of a touch,
that come
to the swaying black canopy above
knowing meaning resounds in analogous things,
and things are more enduring than their bodies’ apparitions,
arriving on this page now,
blasted, wanting,
as anything once tremulous
and living
Judith Bishop’s most recent collection of poetry is Interval (UQP, 2018), winner of the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and a finalist in the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award. Her Calibre Prize longlisted essay on love and data appeared in the PN Review (UK), n.242 in 2018.