The Frontier Temptation

The Frontier Occupation


A frontier is temptation.
At the edges
We are not what we were.

After adventuring, whaling,
After the black-sheep trail,
We come to a final court:
And say:
“When we found
ourselves at the edge
of the universe
we did different things
things we would not have done
at home,

Yet, before we lost ourselves
by leaving,
before we gave in
to the desire over the range,
came the dreams
of the stone pillow;

call it Jacob’s ladder:
was it for Up
or Down?

In the desert, in savage lands,
Among the aborigines, indigines
beyond the land of attitude,
we faced the test, the trial.
Did we desert? Lock up or in?
Did we lapse and
become savage?

Some,
sometimes, dizzy as drunks
we walked that edge, that line
was not painted, there was
not any paved road!

Did we kill the aliens
Before they did us?
at the edge,
it was there?

Occasionally,
We found what we truly
Believed, our own edge
Or lack of it,
I saw a few.
I glimpsed
into one.
It was
when we allowed
the brink
of the universe to tilt,
like pouring
beer from a jug into the glass
of us
over the edge, into the
run we have always been
waiting an opportunity
to slide,

or else
to find the sharp stance,
the moral fibre,
the gift of right
that finds brink-landings
to stand upon,

and refuses,
however tempting,
to turn those visionary
pillow stones
to fill our starving belly
in a fresh bakery
of warm loaves.

But being not so yet
we ate

and were pleased
and only sometimes
and long afterwards
sorry by amounts
we cannot put in
a tax return.


23 October 2003 © Wayne David Knoll
The Cascades, StonyCreek, Monbulk, Victoria