READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

To read him say he wipes the window into childhood and sees its workers Artisans at Veneto doorways hewers of wood and grinders of knives Is to wipe across the winter window and watch trades as they went: Milkman, leave those bottles on the footpath catch up with your clink-clink horse cart Garbage man, empty the stinking bins from the shoulder, set down with grace Butcher, amidst sawdust air, sever the offal slice the lines accurately for hours Ironmonger, lift the weight and feel the time it will take for a hard sale Blacksmith, fashion more glowing horseshoes in the shed behind the bowsers Knitters, by day and night make home comfort go full length He helps us see work without sentiment labour worth the years it takes Who are we, tied to the end of cables our income a set of numbers in a vault? And what are our chances of breakthrough to an arca

Once again in the zizzy dialect he set out to park reality in our minds The stone houses of Treviso ancient pavings in summer heat Here the words track earth change all the way to the Geiger levels Barely able to believe it is coming to an end already Down where the rootworks feed grasses picking their moment to gush The radio waves muzzy and chattering their once in lifetime insistences We return to it his intuitions that in his way mutated into instructions Invitations   invasions intimations that nature (word overused) gets us in turn Once again here in the surety language offers he gets us For whom Treviso is a day trip farmlands fallen castles canals More so where we are now this instant listening not only to solitary cicadas Or jazz from an outmoded sound machine in antipodean backyards at dusk Questions about ends and starts all