the sisters carry out
their work,
hanging
the night’s
lamps
throughout
the dark
I want to punt the unripe
nectarine down a dawn-beige hallway of snores and shrieks.
I don’t believe that
taupe is a colour. Everyone is trying to convince me of something.
At what point is it all too ludicrous?
Taupe. That’s when.
I suspend the belief like a sky-eating pie,
grisly, gutsy, topless. Sexily soggy-bottomed. One for the necrophiles and the pimple-poppers.
A turtle without a shell isn’t
cute and naked. It’s dead. A spatchcocked ribcage. An ex-exoskeleton
thwapped open like fresh coconut. Do you know how many people die by coconuts every year?
I swear to taupe. Always pack extra bones. Conceal a peach pit in your rusted jaw.
A shell is a body. A pie is destined to splat. A coconut is shy.
I can astral project myself into anything but a false colour. I eat taupe
every day. I do the same thing forever. It’s taupe. Doesn’t exist.
I don’t know where this came from. The nectarine ripens, protects its teratoma. Taupe edges
back to the imaginary. I scare it all away.
Creatures dart between worlds
come into focus into or across meadow and forest.
In the small surety of spaces its indefinite edge fills
with movement (abundance and distribution
the uncertainty of position). Against
a general green of foliage I raise field glasses for
particularity: of leaf, of plumage, underwing, coverts.
Our interference in the process signalled by alarm calls
high above and shrill, insistent of a breach.
Requiring acknowledgment. Unable to see
my own self without distortion I see the periphery
the first surface, the furthest from my eyes.
There’s power to interpret if we can’t measure
: pretending intentions, desires, knowledge
another world, increments, the subject world, ditto.
Presence is easier to describe than absence. A bird
darts forward forsaking shelter, edges into ‘space’
our space we assume because in our field of vision.
‘Ownership’ that is disputed noisily by the bird
with its own curiosity. Visible through movement
and colour, a mosaic of spaces between things.
Quantum self. And of consciousness?1
Lout over the nano-fields for words
: I have multiple interpretations for the vivid presence.
The sky tonight! is white
Unseamed light, seamless time
unboundaried—
the moon’s blank disguise
clockface sans figures & hands
whitely drifting in
white space
The winking snow of neutrinos
linking you 2 me
, Donne’s flea
quantum leaping, trillion biting
every body
—your blood my blood
your irradiated marrow mine
You & I molecular whole—
compact as zer0
Is all we know inferred from nature?
This is self-knowledge—our love
thoughts, our dream drifts,
the Gaia abandon of another year’s end
—don’t blink!—
hurtle-bang into the bends
the screaming free-fall of those
—blink!—
dispatched from youth
Glorious rush into my doppelganger deathself
now free-wheeling contraclockwise
to this street corner
, Hello!
my last, perfect love
Dr Moussé utters
a satisfied sigh
as Malby’s terrestrial globe
is unpacked from straw-stuffed crate
three feet in diameter
all points of the compass
converging at Beechworth
Mrs Goodman commands
her girls to file past
in reverential pairs
you need not be concerned
with spherical geometry
or trigonometry
with applying thought
And calculation
to the deduction of real motions
let us marvel at how
the skin of our earth
is covered with colonial ink
how we educate and elevate all
On their exit from the athenaeum
Mr White slowly spins
wondering where twilight
begins or ends
trusting he can find
the rising sun at any day or hour
by the brazen parallel
Dry-eyed, Mrs Polmear
traces the contours of the frigid zones
she can never find her son
accepts that the visible
universe is divided
into earth and heavens
that the discovery
Of cosmic dust in Greenland
is a smudge unanticipated by the
the interval of conjunction
of two revolving bodies
may be precisely reckoned
but her loss cannot be mapped
It’s as if the blue gum stepped out
from shredded clothes
threw off its rose-coloured
hair rollers and tie-dyed layers
to rest upwind from the seaweed’s
brittle antlers its rough bundles
of musk and chartreuse thread—
and just kept moving
Here the air hosts an orchestra
of falling whistles rainbows
are swift-winged thunder gurgles
and sea and sky and, right now, i
are one in mood and vast uneven
breath the water’s pummeled gleaming
lurches toward a staccato
horizon an infinity
of dimples that keeps persuading
the light to fracture and fill it all
the while sea custom-knits
currents to transport her motley
prototypes—starched Victorian collars
sardonic templates
for bubble wrap assorted millinery
that’s seen better days strewn
just so in the latest
castaway installation
merely skin wrapped bits
these
four more or less
inutile limbs
stuck to a floppy core
water fat yes
they overlap
wild and grossly
inaccurate
such that left open gaps
remain
form but unmade
apertural
in real time
“What I am writing to you goes on and I am bewitched.”
– Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
1.
Neptune’s clouds have vanished. So distant
from the Sun, high noon
is a dim twilight. Yet waning solar flares
have travelled through deep space
to reach this distant child
and empty
Neptune’s sky. We pierced
our planet’s membrane, sifted
interplanetary dust
just to watch this god
become exposed.
The images are grainy but we can see
a giant stripped of cloth
tempting moons
into its orbit.
Parent planet. Captured
moon.
2.
On Earth, I read Lispector, who wrote
of blackened fruit and hope
that she could touch us.
She takes me to Recife
where we trap moths in tissue paper,
careful not to shed their dust.
Her flame exists in oil
lamps, bewitching
wayward mayflies.
Clarice died in Rio
after publishing The Hour of the Star.
She said I sometimes flicker
within all this
distance.
3.
Neptune is slowly drifting,
blue and naked
without its missing clouds.
A planet whipped
by supersonic winds,
where seasons stay for forty years.
Radio waves crackle
when slathered in dark matter.
A dead star
is still a star.
Your solar flares
are waning.
Still, I hear your voice.
like, if she’d seen this fifteen years ago
if she’d seen the girls who like birds and heard the
severin-as-a-she speaking
venus is a boy and he’s
welcoming you to queer graces man
Gabrielle tells us of a dream
ripping up the carpet and the floorboards and the concrete but
baby
baby girl
they couldn’t remove our braces
couldn’t halt the queer spaces
couldn’t rid the places of the girls who like to sit on other girls’ faces
man, if she’d seen this fifteen years ago
she would have understood that fucking haircut
and the hyperventilation
when she says
I’ve just been having
such strange feelings
the latest?
putting your tongue in another girls’ mouth
is not linear behaviour
A child discovers the play of light
on a kitchen floor. The cosmos opens.
His mother watches tiny palms, touching
and retouching the solar display. Like a dazed
percussionist—a tiled universe the stage
for soundless concert—slow and meditative
hands press into light’s appearance-
disappearance, reach for ghost. Here:
the dimpled outline of a little foot,
a little thigh. There: the obliterating
sway of a dog’s tail. The little drummer
drums and drums again: the surface moves
and will not give to grasp. Later like this
vision softens, lengthens vocabularies—
in memory now we mouth the sun’s silent
music, opening a mother’s urge to leave
open—
No one notices the edges slip away,
how the untoothed night simmers
in the streets and alleyways.
To the innocent, there’s no reason
to question whether dimensions shift
or wonder what happens in
the moments before the scrim is lifted.
I have spent many a darkness
pondering what is lost when
peripheries vanish—what beauty
or desolation, lacking witness,
is diminished. What creature steals
away to die, alone and undiscovered.
I can tell you this: My eyes have grown
accustomed to night’s trickeries—
the apparent ease with which the body
accepts injury, the scurrying figure
beneath the streetlight’s pale flicker.
Underlying every human wreckage
is an emptiness born of want.
Sometimes I feel it. Walking the vacant
hallways, I listen for the lost,
the inconsolable, the unforgiven.
I count their footsteps, carry the weight
of their brokenness in my bones.
put a vase of small pink flowers on a window ledge
look at a field of potatoes for a month
while not forgetting wars & wars & wars
grow rain inside your lungs
put on woolen gloves
& only take them off to warm your hands over the fire
fall asleep dreaming of that dead star
kick pebbles along a lane
then curse your childishness and curse your black boots
pat a wet dog like you never had children
write a letter to the son you never had
smear beetroot on a white wall as you walk through the old town
waiting for the sun to come
when the sun comes make up a song about how you want to run into it
but you’re not brave enough and a catholic so you couldn’t go that far
hide your fears in a cigar-box
suck on something that tastes like your mother
raise a toast to zibby boniek and lucy bpm 37093
point to a figure in the crowd and ask them where all the dirt is coming from
do your best at sobbing louder than the public address system that’s shouting
all those lies again
enter into collusion with the confusion of a patriarchal illusion
take pictures of cream-puffs, or
sit in a downpour and let the drops be your new poem, or
write forty-four lines of ironic resignation
and rewrite until you die of neglect but still somehow caring
on Sunday afternoon, the smoke alarm won’t stop
despite the neighbours who don’t live there coming
and finally finding it in the red bin, head high
above the fence to ask me for forgiveness – it is easy
to join them in their embarrassment, our kinship
immediately possible against the noise,
even when they do ask if I’ll be here next year
and I laugh and say it’s not up to me.
they have the tenants moving in tomorrow
and when they leave, it’s quiet for twenty minutes, then again
the beep, insistent against the lawnmowers and drills,
a bird beside trilling in mimicry. left long enough
space will attune to any sound –
already the cicadas start to sound like a fuse
but that is my own mimicry – the way
I start to write this poem in the noise
before I realise what I’m doing, get up
and crawl behind the compost bin,
under the rusty nail in the fence gap,
walk through their yard, open the bin to find the disk,
its batteries still inside, and slide them out
and hear the silence hanging overhead.
inspired by ‘Kraken’ by China Mieville
At the apogee of oxygen
where cyan turns to cyanosis
and air frays and fritters into space,
where metaphysical angels sing
and ET friction-brakes his saucer
something loses its dispute with nothing
and up finally vanquishes down,
where satellites skim like fins of sharks
and all the stars are notched on night
where eagles do not dare, nor planes
find sufficient lift to place them there
and even party balloons won’t retreat,
the levitator’s overreach,
the other end of Jacob’s ladder,
doubt’s perigee, the rainbow’s arc,
they’ve not yet found a flying squid,
its skin as loose as paper crepe,
as big as a bus, as thin as tin,
diaphanous as the emperor’s rags,
tentacles as long as jet stream’s churn,
flung and blown and tossed
as though a barometric bathysphere,
old ebony beak a dull drawn dart,
eyes as big as Olympic rings,
substantial as a crystal cloud
wandering lonely as a radar fog,
so nothing much can get a glimpse,
not bats nor moths or little birds,
all unidentified flying things,
all clear air turbulence, water
squall, waved-off jets in solid cirrhus
and oops-exposed exposés,
photos of tentacular lenticular shapes,
this nautiloid, this cuttlefish cloud,
a sometimes drench of black ink
dreams, crop-dusted nightmare
drizzled down, cloud-seeded,
contrailed, black-dog bleed,
streamers, smoke-bomb blush
of ink, enough to drown the world
in drink, to stain the good glass
sky, to blank and place a headache
in each head, serpent, prophesied
doom, galed and weathered with
the storm, whichever way an ill-
wind roils, no whales to test it,
no harpooned hand to puncture,
high and dry, adrift and gone, in
oceans of air, sometimes fallout,
sometimes ash, the fritz that hits
the antenna’s spark, this bad-
faith mist, this persistent pall,
this shadow like a squid’s cold
span, this stealthy light leviathan.
The Law of Optimism
The Law of Possession
The Law of Averages
The Law of Symmetry
The Law of Reflection
The Law of Diminishing Returns
The Law of Community
Murphy's Law
The Law of Delusion
The Law of Repulsion
The Law of Equality
Natural LawThe Law of Nature
The Law of Physical Attraction
The Law of Ego
Common Law
The Law of Conservation of Energy
The Law of Ignorance
I. Life and Death
with line from Ad Astra screenplay by James Gray & Ethan Gross
We were marooned here on purpose
carapaces removed—exposed and wandering
We ransacked what we could of civil
life we wondered what made the earth shake
Our eyes were double-visioned all
the time now we wobbled just so just as they
said the earth would wobble before
and Roy was told one day at a desk with aplomb
by Brigadier General Fallon:
Your father has threatened the
destruction of our entire solar
system. Does that not mean
ANYTHING to you?!?
Then everything or nearly everything became
clear: if the monster was the father then
the world ending would be catastrophic and we
would end up eating ourselves
craving connection as I silently spin. to the Samsung washing machine song. appearing when
the next cycle
begins?
‘r
o
u
n
d
a ‘bout there.
edging collision
like a death obsessed dominant.
circling right back to the start, I reinflate my lungs.
this is child’s play, you see? grown-ups laugh in deep tones with dimpled, grey faces. glowing
brighter. spectres highlighting a prize out of reach.
TO BE SOMETHING.
moon of a moon
not enough to dream upon.
almost celestial body
licking sacred water but unchristened.
TO BE MEANINGFUL.
if moons are satellites what clasps at her breast?
born without a purpose so hands and knees absorb the filth.
grasping at dying promises even after they have winked away.
desiring damage to make her
WHOLE.
Poppy, bloom for me in a violent way.
For Rose
In my fresh unpressed petal dress thin and petal-
printed hem to shoulder, I saw you see me and
see double: your gran? your nan? your neighbour?
Summer under the oak is my cloak but my coat –
buckles missing grime-blackened – is more me
the one I take to the Parade, sitting yellowed
at all of my ends, my fingers, my friends I saw you
see triple: she under the tree, she street hunched, she
for sugar at your door, all these mes, these Roses
When I left you double took, purple river underfoot
out the back, why the parcel still on my mat
I heard you, then, thru that bed of petals, call my sister
It was peaceful, she said they’d said, I’d tidied
I say I had a smoke, and then I saw the violet
If it’s 48°C out the asphalt is
approaching the temperatures
where egg proteins start to link up,
so that cracking a million eggs
on the motorway turns it into
a river of yellow-white sludge,
and cars would not risk their tires
slipping on soft albumen. The skill is
finding an exact distance between
skydancers and string hoppers,
how Bedouin crossing the desert
always trace the tops of dunes.
Forget what you think you know
about entropy or dark matter;
the universe longs to be in between
things. It lives in the loophole
that it shoots an arrow through,
as dust mites live on dust motes,
measuring a moment in miniature
that could be a paraselenic linear space
if only you could both see it and be in it.
Pungent afterthoughts
of power, star-encrusted streets.
At the core of the rainstorm,
the heart of the flower.
Your highnesses
clump like scruffy planets.
Erupt, secrete
at the jesting distance.
After Jane du Rand’s Thriving: Brisbane Bush Turkeys (glazed and unglazed ceramic pieces, smalti and porcelain tiles, 2023)
cowl of yellow necklaces flecked
in summer’s gold. there’s negative space
of me you’ll never see –
my feathers unfurling like mushroom’s
fanned underside. over shadowed hill
of rotting moundtop, orange reddens
today’s busy sunset.
i’m not actually a bird.
call me: bald crown, garden
demolisher, pitchfork feet.
call me: focused not flightless.
watch me: as trained eye blackens,
revolves and hones to water-washed sky.
there’s something beyond the clouds
do you see it?
after Jesper Svenbro ‘A Critique of Pure Representation’ and ‘Material for a Geological Theory of Language’
Immersed in speech before you knew
tongue. Ear to your own cry’s
primary exhalation. That tiny cave of bone.
Its tympani formed during your first
swim, tethered to tissue inside her pelvic
cage – osseous cells. Honeycomb. Rigid.
Porous. Surprisingly mobile. Expanding
to grasp you and let you go – slow as
your need, all being well. What
ancient stone-carved god imagined this
contraction and departure into world’s
genealogy of flesh? The toes stubbed
on the mineral throb of becoming. You
with your toothless voice a younger
sibling of mountains and their caverns
cool with percolated lime. Wind-
shaped miracles of gravity. Their eons
echo in the barest bones of things
in memory of Lawrence Priest
I.
Lolo with his diamond-tipped
drill, shooting sparks.
A telescope large as my body
waits in silence.
In space diamonds are common
as sand, interstellar pressure
of fusion inside stars. On earth
there is just this carbon-bound life,
the body another kind of erosion,
tied to time. Bring my eye
to the glass – in this spectacle
of mirrors a planet gazes back,
one eye fixed on me. Who’s to say
there is no one else out there?
II.
In 1977 the Voyager II spacecraft
begun its journey out to space,
never to return to earth. A grain
of sand floating amongst stars,
it bears a record carved in copper,
plated gold – evidence of life
in music, humankind’s first and last
language. Is the vacuum of space
a silent place? Lolo would know
the answer, could drill it from
the earth, pluck it like stardust
out of air. What Voyager II asks for
is remembrance, is witness. If it
were to look back, what would it see?
III.
Now the song I move towards is
unspeakable, eternal as a diamond.
I take its pointed tip and drill,
carve the notes into everything
a song for the stars that is as old
as time, old as the blood-iron
fused inside stars. Somewhere,
lightyears away, time moves slowly
through the space warped by
grief. The space both past and future,
but never present. The space map
and history. In that space, I exist.
In that space, I am gazing through
a telescope back in time, and singing.
