From Afar Poem by Seamus O' Brian

Whatever ink cartographers wield
to tease the ridge of a mountain
from the ambient edge of the sky
puddles under the cleats of my son
as he fords the distance between
Osiris and Icarus
between the eye-lidded horizon
of a father's consternation
and the projectiled release
of a clay pigeon rising.

If you stretched a bowline
from the cleat of Sydney's harbor
to the red rock's ascent above
the pulsing rib-caged womb
of a continent, you'd transect
the yesterday of a footprint unpressed
upon a Blue Mountain unimagined
when I rummaged through his eye
and found a man with a ticket
to tomorrow.