︎︎︎
ROSE LUCAS
Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet and academic at Victoria University. Her most recent publications are 2020 Shelter in Place, a collaborative project with visual artist Sharon Monagle and This Shuttered Eye (Liquid Amber Press, 2021). He new collection, Increments of the Everyday is forthcoming with Puncher and Wattmann September 2022.
Where A Tree Begins
in the electric
blue of brain and
cord and artery
where quiet communities bustle
rhizomes of reaching
synapse
to synapse and chasing
through flickering filaments
like an expanse of night city watched
from a plane’s small window
its territory of what is seen and what
is not
an incipience of energy studded
on velvet black –
in the eye of this azure field
a tree
might begin to
unfold coiled
possibilities of green hidden
encodings of stem and leaf and
blossom delivered into sunlight
that airy space a trepanation
of light and breathing
a clot of roots –
the wonder of what flares
and sparks
and vanishes
swallowed in the crook of darkness
in the electric
blue of brain and
cord and artery
where quiet communities bustle
rhizomes of reaching
synapse
to synapse and chasing
through flickering filaments
like an expanse of night city watched
from a plane’s small window
its territory of what is seen and what
is not
an incipience of energy studded
on velvet black –
in the eye of this azure field
a tree
might begin to
unfold coiled
possibilities of green hidden
encodings of stem and leaf and
blossom delivered into sunlight
that airy space a trepanation
of light and breathing
a clot of roots –
the wonder of what flares
and sparks
and vanishes
swallowed in the crook of darkness
Bloodheat
pounds in cranium’s
dark spaces
a sudden roar of temperature stirring
a primordial wash of impulse
this viscous seedbed of what
drives something
out into the incipient
receptivity of somewhere else
medium of turbulence curlicue of
synapse that leads on
to synapse building threads of distinct
and overlapping patterns
this beautiful cross-section of what sees
or makes what might be
considered meaningful
the brevity of this temporal moment
of fire it flares waves of vermillion heat
sparking the world