like I’m driving backwards
could so easily slip
between the ribs of the black box the boree
and never be seen again
Birrang: country shifting about on emu-feet late afternoon
slow-creek-water-winking
full of turtles
maybe
Birrang: seeing by slant-light
when the vegetation has body
the horizon’s tawny-gold reach into black cloud
and I’m barrelling along present to past
listening to The Pretenders
don’t get me wrong
At a thankful height, we began to emerge. We’d been quiet half an hour through the woods. The horse’s hooves sucked no sound on the brown soft track under the pines. But now, the land thinned and stretched before us. It must’ve took some daring so many years ago by Father to put the wooden house where it was, tucked below and so obviously subservient to the mighty pasture land that stretched out and up before us in its long patches of craggy stone mended together by strips of green.
The wagon slowed. I looked up to where sky settled upon rock.
History presented herself to me as she always had, but this time I was ready for her. The dead could take a final form, but the living remain unformed, like myself, still in the making and susceptible, if we aren’t careful, to shaping at the rough hands of the dead.
Up on the hill, descending, the single and intense image of Father, staff in hand. They called him The Shepherd of the Sorrento Plain. I heard his voice in time: “That’s where we’ve lacked sense; our Bibles have taught us that what sheep need is a shepherd.”
That very well may be, and I was never one to contradict Father, but suddenly I saw that a region of what I had thought gray stones was slowly moving as if the sun was making my eyesight unsteady. The wolves had arrived, a sea of fur and teeth and slink. I knew they’d never come closer.
Father, despite all his contradictions, had always stood clear. But Mother was a mystery. What drew her on? The main problem of history is how to approach a person of great importance who, having departed us too soon, left no telling. It expands. She expanded people into forms who could outlive her, expanded herself into the sleek creatures now bending my eyes. All ghosts are gray.
There was a kind of fold, she’d called it, up there in a sheltered spot high into the pasture land, and she’d slept up there in a shed she built herself for lambing time when the poor foolish creatures hurt themselves. That was what I wanted to see. It was still there, a little older and sagging, like all of us, but remained sturdy. I sat in it and thought about my parents, their bulk and mist, what they left to me, what I’d given them. There is no such thing as an equal exchange. I let the wolves surround me. I could smell them. They were all that was left, the wolves and the mind.
At last we were in the high wagon again. The old white horse had rested and soon we began to climb the long hill toward the hooded ridge. I held his hand. The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.
The Slow Coach runs hourly for the liturgy and watercolours
where the teddy bears’ fur shows how well loved they were.
In addition to the sheep-pen and The Best Years of My Life,
community singing, appealing figures in traditional dress.
A few stragglers peel away from the dramatized tour, a few
linger to touch exhibits or eye the pretty pedestrian escargot
with hole in stockings. The best ingredients journey
back in time to where the butter sizzles.
From the terrace, a personal touch, later than usual. You will
find a special inn. It was bound to be tricky on the throne
or behind the scenes. Here comes the cavalry in software hard
to recognize. Some sheriff romps into office. Most of the animal
kingdom are cordial, only a single dissenter with familiar catch
phrase. The fossil record for this period is rich. The ore typically
stockpiled in the open, never to be woven into the fabric of the
trampoline. Alas, the house can no longer contain the cash
shackled to a secret door behind a fake shelf of action fiction
for him, tonic fiction for her, where all distinctions blur.
Ice shelves were given a boost by consumer confidence
while naked statistics respected the wishes of the islanders.
I
You say, I wish I were
floating
still
and you are
in the timeless place
they call childhood
a photograph
II
Look, there you are—
a red dot floating
in the middle of the blue
in defiance of land
as if you were
alone
Still
someone was taking the photograph
III
The past draws you
in collusion with land
thoughts as heavy as concrete
leave seaweed stranded
in the wake of tides
where seagulls pitch
on wind-beaten wings
salt stings
IV
My mother, you say
the island
the sea
define the shore
where old ends and new begins
where the iron-lung of the sea breathes back and forth
cliffs crumble (over millennia) into the sea
waves settle solid as rock
the island shifts on its foundations
or the wind tilts the frame
a photograph
the breeders of night’s royalty are out | stepping the pavements | talking to
cars | to the Antarctic night | people don’t complain | don’t soil their mitts
on hills stretched tight | i’m described as a seizure in words | an overused
product | a tribe-torn society | i live in a mercenary’s dugout by the sea | &
often the morning’s the great spoiler spinning into the eyeballs of revellers
caught out in the sun | i play blind man’s buff in the fog | i grab my share
of the industry | there’s much to put on display | to be repeated | enough
for everybody to feel their eyes watering | to satisfy their requirements |
the individual smells of old clothes old furniture | this crowded house | this
theatre of place | of re-enactment | of cramming excitement into a gap | it
animates latent luminaries | flames from candles fizz into a tide’s still
reflection | i ignore why i’m here | my hands sketch winter mythologies
of orchids | white geraniums | a grapevine muscled in a trellis | i tag
my garden with labels | i’ve written of love’s pictured pedestal in a
ghost story | my hands fondle the smoothed-off intersections of a
tower’s crystal skull | today | this green horizon shifts its lofty peaks
its jagged ridges | today | people watch this maternal colossus crawl
on all fours across broken ground | her breath warming its hidden depths
Walking home in the unsteady night fragrant with stars,
we stepped through fig mush and the sand wrack
of yesterday’s high tide, arguing with the beach
and maybe we pierced noisily through someone’s story,
webbed ragged in this Quondamooka country, broken
language of place, stirring with clumsy bats disturbed,
but we saw nothing on the way home from dinner that
was not as certain as a streetlight’s stamped aura
or as doubtful as the pavement’s root and wander.
In two hundreds year we have coined a bushranger
and mythologised the storming a of beach and that’s it,
I tell you, as you lead me through the foreshore,
but we look up to see a tree of birds sleeping,
tucked into their trust an arm’s length from our wonder.
What other dreams but this? What other path but ours?
Robust growls epic among the tended
roses of no.5 Florence Ave, columns of
Athene rising from the stupor. A heavy
classic. Worship via Siri via Kabbalah?
Clutching at plurals & paystubs. GOD?
All the insufficient funds I tried to hide
under my skin came out! & going black
with doubt & love & damn it I am still
here in my tracksuit wondering about
GOD & the Saturday cohort. Folly! Folly
after GOD. Looking from cars & looking
from bars uncertain, sifting through the
jargon of faces compelled. & I should be
so glad? There are lambs in the eyes of
eagles. & who will be spared? HOLY? &
I feel 2D, I feel like a ghost. I should buy
a tuxedo & a jag & ooze bank like a saint,
but Ah! the gist is lost on each sanctuary
I destroy & damn it I continue to walk
with the sun in my eyes & gloss hashtag
fuck! The milieu will not consider piety,
my loyalty to the sedan & the mall will
not be dispersed. GOD in a grocery bag
heavy with GLOSS & galore. Stop eating
organic ! Buy in bulk ! Learn to freeze !
Buy a mortgage! GOD? Stretch GOD out
like a water bill GOD can handle it. been
GOD before flat pack furniture was even
born. So deep is the hysteria of SUV, so
deep is the hysteria of being 3D I even
noticed the sky the other day & it was
HOLY more holy than GOD I was in my
neighbours yard watering the flowers.
for Bella
twilight is crowning the hills
gum trees stripped back to ghostflesh
the crossroad is abandoned
car radio harmonising
I drum my fingers on the dashboard
heartbeat a steady bass
accompanying the caramel smoky sun
that anoints your profile
with its last golden touch
along Princes Road
as the lights flare to life
only green is go
I wait for the dark to come
let’s escape
drive, my queen
You own my heart
for T & B
The year was ending where the lakes meet the sea.
Small preparations in the weatherboard; fish and lemon
with someone else’s Australian pop collection
as chalk-white boats headed out
through the sunroom louvers.
Adorned peninsula. Chained gates and laurel hedges.
Climbing down to the fishing village, last drinks
and last light disappeared from the lawn
of the waterfront hotel. The seasonal town
had slipped from its mooring posts.
Such unperturbed companions, surveying
empty yards along the street. Claiming
the moonlit lime of the bowling green
to watch stars from plastic blades.
The long night loitered at shop windows
then reached back into the inlet.
It wound the boardwalk,
a slow reverie along black water
to the vacant resort pool; uninvited
and treading beneath its chlorine skin.
As midnight fireworks hammered
wry shapes into the bush land,
we made our assembly to the spectacle
for the crowd over the hill.
The grass loops long outside my window. Sags into itself. A thousand lithe men bowing
in one direction, a lone sunflower here & there draped over their knees. Little slut.
I forget to cut them down. It is winter now and the sea of green is bright with death
as if begging for the attention of the blade. I can’t afford a lawnmower. Still, I picture
myself pushing a fat hungry thing on the yard, shirtless, a thick beast among snaking
weeds. I’m unsure what to kill out here. What qualifies as weed: nasty useless unflower,
purposeless growth—and anything that isn’t beautiful has no purpose, I’ve heard.
The grass though, if grass it is, has such luscious curls. It tells there is beauty in neglect.
My baby cousins have curly hair, all little Lebs. Some grow out of it. Some are cut down
before they can. The air mows the earth. Sky rake. Cloud gardener. The land lord
is unhappy. This is not Greece, he said. What a shit sea. There is no one here to save
from it. I want the waters to rise higher still, submerge my body. I want to stalk naked
through its soft hands, lone sunflower looking to spread against lengths. To queer this
domestic Eden. A fantasy. There are no persuasive snakes in my yard, just one crabapple
tree bristling with overripe cheeks splotched red, rotten cores. They bob on the sea,
fallen fruit, baby heads. The cold is creeping in. There is no one to save here I whisper
as I go over every inch with my mouth and lovingly tender the green.
Stripped back to primal desecration, our hearts still yearn for unicorns.
– Peter Boyle, Apologising to Unicorns
In my dreamscape a flip-flapping strip of orange strikes the sky over Kunduz
as the kite trails a boy, before the hospital is hit from the air. I wander into a
museum without walls, rolling across Sydney’s foreshore. A vein of orpiment
runs through history’s sandstone, splitting the rock’s seam. During an interval
between blasts when I tune out from the news, I peruse the poet’s art, secret
sibling to music.
An ibis is searching with its ink-dipped beak for the natural environment
eclipsed by an esplanade. Oblivious, it picks at the word-swept earth.
What does it know of the day’s soundbite or a boy’s withered innocence,
fissures concealed in a landscape, as the world bends beneath? A bird’s
song listens to the whisper of its origins, an utterance under the fig tree
where I sit. The sun tips into late afternoon at the beginning of the solar
slip, and drops on a note.
The dream was a setting for a fable in a future time, a blue cloud weeping
its word-memories. Now it drifts, noctilucent, above a cottonwool world
impervious to the perils of a deleting image… An absence of unicorns.
The phrase ‘secret sibling to music’ was adapted from André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls: ‘the languages of art’ are ‘secret brothers to music’.
‘a blue cloud weeping’ was inspired by the title of Peter Boyle’s book The Blue Cloud of Crying.
for my father
Tibouchina, warm maple-leaf, elsewhere it is winter.
My father standing at the doorway with a phlegmy cough
in the damp basement flat, his gaze a despair,
resignation, I fear before the rite of knowing.
I take the Piccadilly line after
Singapore transit, change at Leicester Square
to come back to this room,
outside time.
Some days, for no reason, I shed tears.
Some things cannot be reconciled, how do we heal them?
Already in his prime, my father is falling,
And I fall with him
(the kind of man who does not dwell in detail— surely that is greatness
to know when the end has come.)
Forget the taunts, the colour of your skin, the sticks and stones. (He laughs.)
I have spent my entire life catching up to history,
it was never my favourite subject.
We are falling out of the centre of the world into oblivion,
my mother by the maisonette window, distracted.
Clouds are skimming; leaves are spiralling down from the plane trees.
She does not notice beauty, though it notices her.
And I am the dreamer. I cannot bear her pain, or his,
conceding rather, the price paid for dreams.
Now I wake to blackness, that punched-out hole in the ground,
rehearse the law of physics
I’ll answer when gravity calls.
She woke flying, her cheeks burnt to a flush, the world an illusion in lipstick tones of green, a loudspeaker advertising local services-if you need a new car speak to the guys at green Toyota. Everything green washed. The grass striped, eucalyptus-swayed leaves, olive bark. The land was not hers. Interloper. Dressed in local clothes but speaking in tongues.
A pop song everyone knew played in the background. It was by all accounts a beautiful day. People said it again and again. She was a migrant to the space, caught between worlds, at the intersection of now and then. Like a level crossing. A train zoomed by. She saw both spaces simultaneously, she knew and everyone knew from her accent, the tilt of her head, that she was different.
A game was being played. Every now and again a whistle blew. When that happened the ground shifted. People shook their heads. She absorbed it, wrote it, syncopated the sounds, the dream she was finally able to shake into a warm wind against her cheek, the buzz of gnats above the bleachers, and thump of ball on boot in the strange familiar unfamiliar present that never happened.
Should I stay or should I go now? – The Clash
I saw a jackrabbit on that ranch
where you went for a run
and I walked the gravel road
with the coyote skull and deer bones.
You and the rabbit ran,
second hands on a clock diverging.
All I could do was stop and stare
at the rabbit, ears like bookmarks,
bony nose speed-reading the sage,
blazing across the high desert
like that hare at the dog track.
I am still frozen in that moment,
anchored like a rock jack,
one foot planted, the other scratching
an arc in the sand, head swiveling
like a weathervane.
How many times, looking towards
whichever bay it is
I’ve been drawn to, casting myself out
across the horizon,
held aloft by this or that
particular bird (today a flycatcher
suspended above the River Derwent
singing out its heart
on a wire);
watching a tree teased out of its trunk
by the acute sun, its shadow
like spun wool
drawn off a spindle that won’t stop
being pulled,
thinking I can stop the inevitable fall
back in my bone.
And falling, of course, the bird
long since
gone
(and all the feathered lengths my head
went to
shot down
at dusk).
like egypt opoutukeha’s fate
was never written in the stars
it was writ on a piece o park
in grey lynn by a kahawai
the gardener dug up in the dirt
a goddam miracle memory
in soil unstoppable steak
silver-wet & whatta girl
her flip-flapping tail all
tenacious in the earth
this kahawai tried to turn
the light back on she did
gleaming the gardener said
she went like wwow! wit her
fireworks while the dusk was
failing showt the gardner the
everythink even da shadows n
his shed where he’d hung her
high (his trophy fish) on the
wall so he cd hear her sing
(and she sang sweet):
remember how i bathed
youse nourisht youse
fed youse all till you fartd
and now all i smell is
yr piss running warm
over my hauraki eels
fossilized stiff on the path
off williamson’s still
pointing the way bk 2 okā pā
quarried way off the radar
they were my friends
1.
The distant mountain
— inverted —
levitates above the horizon
2.
Overnight
boulders are raised on pillars
of ice
3.
Cumulus clouds bloom
out of a cobalt sky
plump as mould
4.
Cicadas emerge
from death masks
gleaming
5.
Bayonets of light
eviscerate the canopy of cumulus
A crow carks and departs
6.
Praying for rain
the shrubs offer
flowers
7.
A semi-circle of standing stones
hides in the shadow of song
and silence
8.
A murder
or an unkindness interrupted
rise over roadkill
9.
A shower of
fluttering wings startle
rippled rockhole reflections
10.
The watermark of a ghost
gum hangs in the mist
where a hill might grow
11.
The weight of cement
silences country — and yet
the leaves rustle
12.
A crow alights on an upper
branch — holds the tree upright
without effort
13.
The gloaming dusk creeps
up the glowing-orange cliffs
like gangrene
14.
Mountains meditate
in silence — their shadows
prostrate before them
15.
In the west
fragments of cloud dissolve —
All the rest is sky
Chin lowered, I moulded into
the scene behind your shoulders,
pressed our embrace into the ley lines
like we were some novelty shaped
biscuit cutter sunk sharp into dough.
Flung back in a waterless mirror of
From Here to Eternity, we rushed against
the dirt and plastic shine of new grass.
I kneaded your arms, scored you
with fingernail half-moons and
brushed my mouth – your neck –
egg white wash and pastry shine.
Sun-baked against the landscape,
our edible design soon cooled into
a memory of Combray madeleines.
With the taste of tea I recall
your fingers; curved shells,
and your eyes; hidden almonds.
I will glue the mountain cracks
with wildflowers and flayed feathers,
place my palm on the sun-stroked face
to affirm the ridge’s jaw hasn’t slackened.
I will learn to mimic the raven’s kraa,
to retreat snakes back into their skins,
cake mud to seal them for another winter.
I will re-chant my grandfather’s warning—
that even the most stoic crumble under enough
weight— (his lips in front of his father’s gin-fist)
–this wall of petroglyphs after rain
that hammered for days, keys to its decrescendo.
But you are still tucked
under a sheet of rocks, despite.
Driving to the hospital, I see a woman in her bathrobe
picking goat head blooms into a box of tissues,
wondering what kind of breaks their lemon color
might be holding together.
After harvest there were autumn days
of airy nothings. Plein-air.
I hoped that one day, like this
we could build ourselves
a new estate to take the place
of the old one
indexed to its horizon
of dismantled chateaux.
We would grow our own ancient wheat
in a field dotted with subsidised tractors.
Storms rolled in and other weather effects
we could filter out, at least the worst of them.
We compared British clouds to sheep
in dozy evidence of picnics.
I could dream of my younger self
in a cloak of oaks and green leaf-light, the light
unseen in England or Australia,
the light the painters saw
when we dreamed, the golden glow
rolling in
over a desert inland sea.
Let us descend into the blind world now
A table drops from the fog:
you pick something autumnal.
They’re swimming the tiergarten,
they lean forward pouring accordions.
A rasp. Island heels. The money you waste
was always going to be. Sunny evenings:
an ink smudge. You ask for a bramble
on a round table and everybody’s picturesque,
merely spelling.
