A poem for a birthday, not a birthday poem

For a good friend.

Fangs of Conscience

I stand atop an embankment
pitching rounded stones
into the red-raw clay below.
Tea-trees list in the breeze
and dangle their branches in the cool
of an unrippled pool.

The stones clack like dice
and form a sloppy cairn
below my feet.
On the hill behind me, a cow
hoods its lips over a stand of clover
and fulfills its ambition to eat.

Out of rocks, mud on my cuffs,
I look on my works and despair
in the chill air.