Judith Bishop has published poems in The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, Heat, and the Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse (ed. Peter Porter). Voices of antipodes The skywriter fallen, a slick of lightning foraged in the stars for his remains. The road foreclosed, as of dawn. Had his body crept ashore in its abandonment to dusk, as we spoke, was a south wind savaging his chest? Boats abided on the tides, near brother and diminished! Mouths opened on the many. Then we heard what dissipates in the silence of response. Saltarello I. There was this: a procession of cloudbands wind skated over, causing each to align and separate, marching souled toward a horizontal merger. Flying shibboleths between us for the tree without a name, we lay apart under skies white poppies wouldn't scent.         II. From a bridge late afternoon, planks and         goosewire iron to one side and below: you         and young creekwater were resolute, lark-eyed         trajectories, establishing yourselves between         stone and shone; tripping with the progress of         the world's non-progression; and breaching         anomy. III. Then I came upon you guarding the peace of another, her white-walled departure. Now her face, beside the sea: at one remove, but what: a glass inscrutable, lucid; an only, an ever tenebrae.         IV. Induce a weed's eye view of underwater furling         under. The desire we seeded, we see has come         to this: water twice trodden in while dawdling         on the surface grew at last toward our own         shape, slowly green-mantling the stones we had         crossed: now waxing uneasy, beaten back by sun. V. That your ear – that flesh – is radiant, a second dawn emerging, moving into cold trees: that we mourn the dispersion of our saturnine rings.         VI. Bearing lame words which cannot leave the         bruised path, nor leap apart to bite a fig         from a branch with the curvature of clouds,         on a sharp strung morning: glass embittered         over days unasked for, thus unanswered. VII. An incessant, fire-white and brackish pair of cockles, having once grown fitted to disparate flesh, is detached; darkdrifted; and gathered at the last. Sub modo given, what remains to be told: a blue campanula your wax & flare beneath the soles of my child air tangling    her legs: I heard the moon    crash down the vines /    for what she yelped : kill the thief!    your words were taken out and smoked