Prime Numbers — by Les Murray

Normally I live in the country,
work, garden, parry thrusts from the Herald,
but two days a week I fly in
to a cubicle in the Stacked City,
an every-coloured brick university
that is built on top of itself
like a brain's lobes and evolutionary layers
on the last rock before Botany Bay.

The inner streets of this oppidum
are paved with grey carpet, and inmates
lie on them for cool negotiations
or to write in big pads. Footsteps with vocal
animate the stairs and little squares;
odd walls not yet built over
catch sun and frecklings of leaves;
a coffee shop may form round a stairwell...

Back above the racehorse-named streets
in Overlap City, I'm really a specimen,
a mountain to geographers...