From the recording Riversdale
A quietly surreal poem where the ordinary world appears to possess a consciousness of its own. Through heightened observation, humour and inherited wisdom, animals, landscape and objects seem to know slightly more than the people passing among them — suggesting that even the smallest gifts may carry meanings understood only much later.
Lyrics
Free Eggs
A Texas gate laughed
under our wheels,
our talk rattling
like cutlery in a drawer.
Daybreak, half-stirred,
leaned into the lane,
its light remembering morning.
Grass whispered along
the car’s underside.
We passed spring lambs
stitching daffodils into place.
Somewhere, a crow
counted the light
and lost the next number.
The bull waited,
muscle thick as raincloud;
steam lifting from him,
as though thinking aloud,
the field tightening
its greenness around him.
Two border collies
flattened into shadow,
circling clockwise
and counter-clockwise,
snapping at the tyres—
devoted, or
answering a command
we couldn’t hear.
They never misstepped.
Mums could talk
the butter from a scone,
so we lingered—
half cake,
half conversation.
By the time we bounced
back down the lane,
twelve golden eggs
glowed in the wicker basket,
soft with warmth,
soft as waking.
The bull watched us leave,
his patience hanging low
over the road,
chewing over the deal
as though he knew
what would break.
My father once told me
nothing is ever free.
The eggs kept humming
in their sleep;
one cracked
just before the gate,
as though it remembered
before we did.