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

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