The Bush

for Seamus Heaney Overture: violins: it is all scraggy, wideawake, ironical, decked out in denim fatigues. Witty and welcoming, leathery-evergreen, bemedalled with beercans, cowpat and wallaby-dung, flap, nub, hinge, node, blindeye quartzite, wafery sandstone, bright as a button subtle for mile on mile far from vulgarity (far from sleek Europe) in its array of furniture tonings sheeted by sunglaze lovingly dusted, wispy and splintery, tussocky, corduroy, all of its idiom dry as a thesis to moist outsiders: wonderfully eloquent on its home ground, branchful of adverbs, lovingly wombat-hued, dreamily sheeptoned, fluted with scalloping surf and every step a joke.