Rain Event in the Whispering Country.(Poem)

 
RAIN EVENT IN THE WHISPERING COUNTRY 
 
   I 
 
   The black cattle congregate to blink at grapefruit splendour, 
   that gold satellite hanging over them. 
   Incomprehensible. 
   The Moon--woman-steeped, bringer of blood, the mother cycle--which 
   rose from the landline late and fast 
   bringing a low tide of warmth. 
   Vast rosecoloured, milky petal-textured, pot of 
   clotted cream. Her rich tangerine fullness, like a swollen areola 
   in the full breast of that night. 
   She leaked her salty hindmilk down 
   spilling out on the brooding cattle country, 
   on sweet-faced Angus, and 
   filling the Lachlan languid through dark floodplain. 
   The whole flat Whispering Country 
   bathed in the mystery blue, 
   salt-licked by the syrup of milky lume. 
   Before the Rain, 
   the world in dilation, swelling. 
   Later, a rainbow ringed the moon high up-"this 
   means rain," he said. 
 
   II 
 
   We woke before dawn 
   to the never-forgetting sound on the high tin roof, 
   the heart-settling roar and 
   the sight from the homestead window framed in white voile, of a 
   world corrugated with falling sheets of tin-coloured water, 
   the vague mist, the warmth, the matched rising in our bodies, and 
   our hearts, long drought-stricken, drinking up. 
   The rain rose like a crowd 
   calling itself joyously. 
   All day the chainmail of rain riding the low horizon, 
   grass battened and anointed in a burnished brass, and green 
   relishing itself 
   newly-discovered in the downed shields of glassy puddles 
   throwing back anodised sky. The looming. 
   In the heavy, sodden light, the mirrored earth, glazed 
   copper-minted soil 
   thickening and sighing. 
   Evening winged in. 
   It fell in smoky curtains of cloud, 
   the land pressed lavishly by the spun velvet of 
   blue upon grey upon darker blue and purple, 
   horizons of indigo shades backing onto themselves, 
   fold after fold of the thick, ...