S/
Walking.
Haefliger’s Cottage
Hill End Creek
Post Office Flat
The Common
High Street
Irish Town
Specimen Gully
Bald Hill
Golden Gully
Eyes rake eroded ground for a gleam of glass or china. Clinking together in the pocket of my green parka.
A friend told me
she walked
the ks with
the tome on her back,
weight of exhaustive history
collection
to understand that other ground
she traversed
I too cross the same ground
(but different)
sweeping over the surface
—and occasionally
seeing the surface lift off
Stuff is always breaking
At first the crack, and then
a longer fracture
till at last a disintegration and
the pieces left
In walking the return
to the calm
of the longer view, the pace at which
the meek set out
The shards we find in the fields
still-visible inhabitation
of ghosts
In the fish
in the sea turtles, the fragments
we call nurdles. We’ve paved
the inner lives of the ocean
with plastic. And
in the abandoned gold fields
the occasional glint
of tea service, of
what they thought civil,
smashed.
The histories of rubbish are
our histories. Yesterday,
the middens of hard rubbish collection.
Next week, the how-to-compost
lessons. And always
the worry over humus, how
to build it. We housed
the dead before we housed ourselves.
The critic meant the entombment
of corpses, but
the rest of the burial trove
counted too. That’s why
we unburied the urns.
News comes, unexpected
word of the poet
then come into town again
from time spent digging graves. The teller
outing herself as naïve
—that she thought this normal
for a poet, for we
who spend
time with the dead. These dead
those from the same field
of fragments.
State of emergency.
The ground
has been under emergency rule
since the ruminants
packed down the soil
stopped air
to humus,
humanitas
And elemental trace,
lode,
reef. And finite
stuff. Infinite hunger.
Exhaustion.
Break a vase or
tea cup or saucer
or bottle or ginger jar
or back
and the love
that reassembles the fragments
leaves town
when the gold
is gone
That day
the shelf collapsed
a cataract
of Willoware found floor
Some bounced
I took to my knees
with the dust pan
Porcelain dust
while Sandra
gathered the shards
for a mosaic of brokenness
at jade plant’s foot
collecting dew
The tome on my back changes
but I always travel
with ghosts
Denim worn to frayed
irreparable threads
thrown
Extraction is the only logic
of gold fever
—and its aftermath
mercurial
tailings lace
ground rendered secular
The graves the poet dug
generations after the gold boom
decades after the artists
his shovel for those
who stayed, though
the town appears on some lists
ghosted
the soil he dug leached
with speculation’s grammar:
past’s future, future’s
past
Imagine that future strata
excavated
anthropogenic, plastocene
—landfill compacted
and uncovered
precious folly
reed of luminous hunger
I dwell
in the past of determined
reuse—of the labelled
jars
“string: too short to use”
of the rag-and-bottle
merchant, greasy
skin scintillant
with waste
with imminent incineration
The artist
who proclaims her medium
context—her habitation
the county dump
assembling
the installation that tells
of fads, of land
sales, resales
of in attention
And I walk again
—in the inner suburbs
rarely find the shards
just abandoned bottles
I carry the poet of garbage
carry his proclamation
garbage is spiritual
Take only photographs
as if we ever
left a place pristine
I’ve been walking
every street of Leichhardt
recording every place
asking: how
does a place remember itself?
Imagine the schoolchildren
oozing out of busses
at the mine, never
questioning
memory
If garbage is spiritual
this trash is also memory
middens of care
carelessness
Think of the heat
that fired these fragments
these flakes
of ritual
Someone used the word
abandonarium
I think she meant a different place
place of feeling, bereft
but in the emptiness
(never empty)
the chips of porcelain
little scales of desertion
Old Willow, real Willow
Royal Doulton, Royal
Albert, Wedgewood, Delft, Spode
creamware
fine bone, porcelain
majolica, fineness
so breakable
ceremonial dust
(My pasta bowls (Target)
are chipped now I don’t know how)
The shards
the gold field shards
are lost time patience
I vision them back
in the field as you saw them
leisure shattered
liquidated inattention
Filter earth for profit
—depletion gilding
cupellation
salt cementation
acid parting, distillation
the Miller process
Elemental remains
and what remediation
I read about US landfill laws
the layer
plastic
to protect from garbage leach
legislated 50 year aegis
(warranty
of 60 years)
One foot
in front of the other
and so on
restores
Rubbish
in place of cairn
marker
of the regular path
pieced together fragments
the path we all make
Cross and recross
and recross
this is residence
An artist
found decrepit baseballs
photographed them
mossy, filthy, undone
reauthored
Perhaps the tome
I need to carry
is melancholy
anatomise the ghosts
perhaps
all that rubbish
just the scattered limbs
landfill the ghost
reassembled
He laid his mind out like parquetry on the floor
all different grains & shades connected
a maze of mandala like geometries
of finer polish than he’d ever thought.
He watched the sun play across its face
fingertips tracing smoothes of skin
without shame of intimacy | intimacy led
to greater purviews of self construction.
He was not he, in the constructed sense
of where light stopped & floor began.
He was he in the reflective sense
of gaze upon glaze of own lacquer.
No dust between he & himself,
reflection cut crisp outlines—
perfectly mirrored movement
on a dance floor | his alone to dance.
even in yr swimming pool /
our bodies moved in opposition
first, you’d torpedo (vertical)
limbs slippery and efficient
then clamber out with a shrug
and swollen pupils
just to do it all again
hipbones slicing through the blue!
as if water was invented to wait
on the other side of air:
god’s dependable crash pad
for man’s sickest tricks™
then, i’d expand (horizontal)
my spongy body
cloaked in chemicals,
palms upturned,
eyelids pink against the sun,
silently following
some women’s weekly recipe:
macerate for twelve minutes,
play-dead for twenty,
soak till extremities are thoroughly pruned
you said you loathed
school swimming lessons
(was it the unspoken ratio
of urine-to-chlorine,
or the vision of yr classmates swimming laps:
suddenly anonymous in their matching latex caps
and silver goggles,
thrashing towards you
like a squadron
of aquatic baby cyborgs?)
and one time I was told
not to let my ears touch water:
your thoughts might soften, escape
and clog the pool filter
as if it were a crime
to renounce mind and muscle,
or dunk a sugar lump in a teacup
(at this you’d scoff
and spool yr legs into a cannonball
yr litany? yr prayer? a simple devil-may-care)
even in yr swimming pool /
these past lives sprawled between us
I.
your arrival was a kind of heliography you came with the sunrise: a seven hour process that set the platetone you, the lavender oil laid down to wipe away the steely toned posterior of my ambivalence now turned gooey.
the scientific sensation of a chemical process meant to cure the image in time taken here as the blood and scat that enveloped your body in protective bitumen to deflect the world’s input turned over to sunlight; your image—angel of history.
face turned oblique in your mother’s channel you don’t physically look to/like my past as in, he never gave you your bio/features, but he gave you your name; or rather i rudely interrupted the etiquette of evolution and inheritance to say: ‘here kid, have this but not this.’
genderless is everyone’s first experience, a narrow canal— head long and nameless —through which the world passes and then truly distorts: both thiiin and thennn. sibilant: a hissing speech sound made by forming a small gap between the tongue and the back of the upper row of teeth.
II.
where once ‘it’ was derogatory for ‘infant’ new forms of address as ‘they’ render subjects as p-l-u-r-a-l. the impression of multiple scenes onto celluloid where metaphor means transportation; birth carrying one domain of experience towards the other so that we walk around as hot cases DIY build-at-home-drones —talking ourselves into motion.
fruitful when applied to
humanity
doesn’t mean only physical reproduction; it refers to the process of mental conception which i take to mean my cocreation of you inside another’s womb.
how would saint augustine of hippo have felt in the fourth-hundred year after christ’s demise that by adding one-thousand- and-six-hundred more we arrive at a place where his word is dreamed up in sin’s common currency.
children are mentally conceived of daily coined through cordoned cash flows that quip subjective substances, inheritances self- insemination in bedrooms; rewritings of ‘fruitful’ from fruity as in nutty as in mad to ‘fruitful’ as in elected vagrant —a bird straying from its migratory route, fecund.
III.
i played you mozart once while in utero— does the fact of all the exposure to feminist folk lore undo the intellect you were due if mozart were more heavily rotated? spin another crumpled sucker punch.
music selection is a matter of compromise in this house micro-organism of
the present
rearranging our feelings towards the past ;
do what you wanna dooo
be who you wanna beeee
yeea-aah.
discipline plays like a continuous record, we stick to the score where it counts. where poets were the early internet, we carry boundaries of the plot manually little soldier crabs crumbs of bread scattered throughout the house rearranging your temperament— seasonally.
your intuition plays out like a chorus your defiance repeats in choreography we play into dynamic movement patterns of frustration bump into prolonged affection; we embrace to meet through sound and heat—heartbeat pulses.
IV.
just like a poem is a machine made out of sounds, pronouns human subjects are born through the detection of sonars; rangings of sneakers their squeaks on linoleum next to the tipping point of stilettos: écriture féminine.
you are a blueprint: a variant of nilak bluish pansy of psychogeography rewrit.
In a gully we found it: hash of fallen trunks
like the ribs of some great beast. But
we were too old for it, too big to squeeze within
and too prissy, afraid of the doings of ants
and unknown others, intricate civilisations
and workings of rot, the dried bark half-way back
to dirt, and some maze, some great working
beneath the surface.
Up on Bald Hill, the grey shrubs grew knee-high,
slanted to the salt wind, flowered sometimes
purple like dusk, ochre like sand,
testament to endless endurance, endurance
without goal, without hope.
By night, if you left the track and sat,
shrub-high, you could simply be
gone.
The dull-scaled goanna,
shrunken in its hide as if the flesh
had perished since some past
moist plenitude,
moved in stop-motion, cranking
the cogs of its shoulders. We hung the rubbish
out of reach, beat spades on the ground,
while it licked the air like a slow clock.
Did it leave, whale swimming the dust,
for fear of us, or on its own prerogative?
Everything was wrong with me,
the purple welts where the unsought
woman-body erupted, faster than the skin could stretch,
the fat like off-casts of food.
It was wrong with her too and
I made a model of her fat rolls in the sand
for her to find. She tore apart my B-shaped pen,
threw the plastic in the dirt to warp and fade.
In the tent she rolled on me, savage even
when she’d left her body in sleep, pressed my face
in the stinking mildewed cloth, her on top of me
and her bedding on top of us both.
Each day the sun came up in the tent fly.
A sheet of light on the estuary,
flies rising from the trees like steam.
Each day the lighting of the stove,
one flame for each family.
we took ashes here once
this place of pearl divers
divvied up in tupperware
and closer to sand
than thin lines of incense
left after burning
plastic bags in the trees
singing out with feathered
teeth and beer cans
and cockle shells
and nanny on the water
floating slowly down
Training wheels won’t help you owe it to yourself
Listening for bell-birds along a sagging power stave.
If it seems too far-fetched a clue for going about it
Bathe and persuade, establish evening routine.
If it seeps too far forward
Enter promo code, peel and seal.
A deep drag to blow it off, repairing to the alley burning per-
Diems up close and personal with local beauty hero.
Backstroke of generosity
Big cat walks
Big cat yawns
Serums and gels dotting the i’s of childhood butterflies.
Yonder, lies: an arsenal of pats on the back.
To last a lifetime feel free to ask the story behind
Each rustic remonstrance with the healing power
Of plankton. Big brow doll eyes hitherto cast doubt
On the impartiality of the poor old Data Ombudsman.
That will be (meatballs diminished)
All for now (not a good judge of charred remains)
Binoculars full of fake crows mooning
Over Ms. Gloriana’s cappuccino waves.
Finally I lifted the phone to my ear
And I listened to it ring
I’d have called her sooner
But I’d left it so late already
She’d know how late I was
How thoughtless and selfish
To have kept her waiting
So I waited till I could lie
And call it sudden
And I called
It sudden
And so she thought better of me
She thought better
Of me
With her pardoning
Crackling voice on the line
I think she thought
Better of me
small shoes
crowd my mind
leaving abbreviations
the brain
“most incredible thing in the universe.”[1]
as plastic as the day
II. I don’t recall
schooled agendas
divine rites
of kings and more
the privileged stampede
unlettered = less than
= shame brain
mine
bionic ears
memory maps
oral graphic story tracks
no celebrate
III. I will never forget
skill = skill = skill deft
is everything versed
look listen eyes shut
watch why ears still
genuine with
what does equal equal
ideas bulldoze hypnosis
in regard to the world mess
[1]Oliver Wolf Sacks
A car passes by, its tires soft on the street
gliding through the pine-filled boardwalk,
hollow sounds meeting the ear as it wanders
through the air and lampposts glint with remembrance.
It is a summer night in a vacation city, and they are
whispering through the murmurs of an acacia
stretching its arms over the ballooning skirt of a girl
and the swish of a man’s shorts rubbing together,
passing by as the afternoon has passed. Moment to moment
they turn to each other as tires on the gravel, their voices
like car doors that slam at once, smarting like a hand
on the brake as the car parks—they are talking
about mundane things—dishes left to wash,
chores and laundry, but in their voices gather
the weight of their ghostly past. Over and over
it squeals silently like all the lights of a stoplight.
Seemingly with you but without you, I am
at once beholden to your promises one long ago day,
our heads turning to the other in angles
that indicated intimacy—but that was then.
Summer nights like these seem to never end,
but all has ended, yet still I turn to your voice
as a driver looks in the rearview for a glance
back at an incoming collision. The couple’s gone,
the waves are nearby, crashing with the opulence
of a chorus of seafoam. This is all that’s left
in the town you abandoned. I look up at the stars,
above the streetlights, above the monotone darkness,
and think I can walk along this road alone for miles.
All around me, I can see the intermingled hues,
and hear almost a comforting ring of rescue.
free now brother, from life’s headlock
joke was—we thought we held paper
those hills we once hurtled down
spoke wheels flying—look mum no hands
but we were them, they were us
now, just indignation, soon to land in
another dull season—paddocks
spilt grain—numbers that don’t align
we get up before the world strikes the sun
only our memories have changed
the waiting, the expectation, a robust year
a dry year—whatever it was, unbothered
by comprehension—kindness is all that
remains—a strange sense of waiting.
My daughter’s Bible
cartoonifies judgement: salvation
is a fat pink fish
and all the squid
are going to hell.
She affectionately
calls the Most High ‘Goddy’,
swims under flannel
to the cotton cities of sleep
with her soul
netted still.
I shut the door
because I know she will rise
when he calls.
I shut the door
because I know
how tight the net falls.
we didn’t have much, but my mother
carried an invisible bag around her strong neck
went out searching for food and found
tidbits of affection, small sovereigns of love
she wandered all day while we were at school
would gather the warmest words, the softest touches
her bowerbird eyes found plenty; a scarf left at the bus stop
feathers, a two cent piece, lost keys
one special stone for your pocket
she collected and felt prepared – a sort of parenting kit
afternoon, they grew heavy in her pouch and she wandered home
at times only just arriving as we did
I don’t know if comforts came naturally to her
but she always had a stash of warm things
memories she had collected
a riddle overheard, cats whose chins she’d scratched
a whiff of chocolate on a walk past the posh shops
if we were hungry she’d bring us a mug of hot water
whenever unsure how to respond
Mum reached into the bag to feed us, in tender murmurs
the tiny stories of experience
we waited, beaks open
for the next wriggling warm thing
we could swallow to feel full
always able to kindle comfort
she’d sing a lullaby out of tune
recite a poem Grandma knew by heart
transformed from birds back into children
water-bottle warm, she’d kiss us on the head
we’d fall asleep smiling
as I grew older there were times I wanted to put my hand in the bag
but she was trying to help me grow up
it was time to weave my own
one day Mum put her bag down
we found it by the laundry door, full of odds & ends
– junk without her stories
the hands that no longer collect are stained
with maps to past adventures
now, deep in a maze of corridors, Mum, frail
waits for me to bring pieces of colour to her shrinking world.
The tea room on the top floor of our workplace
looked down the street to the hospital.
One morning someone at our table
asked ‘what’s the oily smoke coming from atop the hospital?’
Unwittingly, I said, being a hospital,
they could be burning flesh.
My companion, a Russian and a long since refugee from Reich Three
fixed my gaze with round steely Slavic eyes.
From one metre, over her tea
she said, emphatically
‘wrong colour’.
(after Agnes Martin)
border is barely different
but the difference holds
liquid from teeming
(to know I’m afraid
breaks me off in small pieces)
after. noon. relief’s
weather.
still house, since. and disks
of milksun cast across cat’s body
which seems a single
darkest bruise—
sunk through with light.
this work.
luckily my eyes see less
and less well, else its
grain would assail me:
photo image in a book
whose spine is not yet
broken (can one come back
from fear? its stream
must drizzle at a pace
integratable in a life—
yes questions of chemistry)
milk.
mayonnaise.
(the way I was so wet, so freshly
painted, with you
—our even pond)
to draw sobs.
—sobs from sheer patience
safer,
skin’s wait turned auditory
(today, earlier I read
high philosophy (kind, hard) then careened
below and parallel
to
concrete monument offsetting
sky. to music. flying in thought
through an air we might have named
there’s more and more
I will not have wired to you.)
beats along imperceptible lines,
fine species of metal ear
(my timid, listening eyes
and my person
having named fear)
do not f— this painting
but might avoid it:
pale,
held.
held to hold open. its formation,
apparently without noise, inscrutable:
art of ab. stain. ing.
from anticipation
( w/r/t futures’ width metre
saturation tone)
and now: [a list of all the words that sound
the sounds of colourless liquid]
I send the message, waiting
waiting
read
restless
a bramble of thorns
underneath my skin
and then
a bouncing ellipsis
·..
.·.
..·
like manna rained down
a reply
a sunbeam
struck down to the earth
plunged into my sternum
to hold up the sky
I had never taken his advice, which seemed counterintuitive and grotesque, like eating meat from a can. I had spent most of my life trying to lower any expectation that had attached itself to me, as if to increase the likelihood that I might one day inadvertently exceed it. My greatest temptation had always been to act in order to recount the action in words at a later date.
And so there I was, in a headlock onboard the Sweet Pea, supposedly writing it all down.
I’ll tip it! I’ll tip it! My brother yelled as he shifted his grip on my neck. Trying to have a conversation with him had become like trying to sit comfortably on a couch covered in aluminium foil.
What, I said. What. What do you want?
There was a curl of waxed rope at my feet, and I was trying to get enough leverage so that I could heft one of its extremities into his face.
You’re not even listening, he said.
If he had one wish, it would be for everything to remain the same, always.
I am, I said.
You’re –
Yeah, no, I am. What do you think I’m doing? I’m listening, okay? I’m listening.
Okay, he said, and relaxed insofar as we could both bend our knees. Then what are you writing.
trying to breastfeed in the rain
over my grandmother’s grave
I express more tears than milk.
they run down the face of the smartphone
I hold to my cheek with one stiff shoulder
(half an hour on hold with the woman from Telstra).
I want to tell her “I have lost my milk.”
(my grandmother, I mean
but maybe the Telstra woman will do).
my eyes sting hotter than my daughter’s lips in the cold
and I have a bad latch
and the artificial lake is choked with weed
and I think “I have given suck”
present tense, perfect (meaning past). I have fallen
short, failed the test
set out in pamphlets, manuals, in the mouths of babes
and midwives
and I could dash my brains out
on the calm synthetic marble
where the inscription reads “here lies”
and I am lying, pretending,
trying to breastfeed in the rain,
in the rain, in the hard hard rain:
let it come down
book a space by the river––not
too close
to the tangle weed friend
dive for hours in the most
severely dimpled wells these
tender fingers
tease fret from air
throw clay from their whole like…
an instinctual animal
remember
the fern creek? the bare ridge
on top of the world
the non
descript corner the dotted silk
sparkle
in their green eyes’ dell?
stars shimmering out of a
wracking mile
like a book-come-alive
the moons––bouncing at the back
mesmerised
our corn popped out
and flew in the…
everywhere we took a bite
twenty years later
grasp its wafer
of threadbare mesh
and in she rocks
a soft-grey cloud
mirrored bright in a river
a shiver––mute
elated with flesh
you don’t get that often they all do
I: Day One
Wombat is perfect. Lies as if
resting, lies on gravel road
as if it were cool burrow.
A narrow stream slowly
pools beneath her nose,
blood thickening as it flows.
These hands alone can’t move
her heft; takes bodyweight
to heave her to the verge
leaving scuff-marks
leading from a scribble
of red in shifted dust.
II: Day Two
It’s 40C. Legs splayed ramrod-straight
she is grounded, overblown balloon:
a child’s absurd plaything.
III: Day Four
Wombat stinks. She is collapsed
onto herself, into herself,
fur coat shucked off evenly,
draped around her body
like an army greatcoat.
A zipper of busy maggots
marks her spine, glisten and seethe
in dappled light. Everything in
and on her moves, everything except her.
IV: Day Eight
Wombat becomes landscape.
A harlequin beetle inhabits the socket
of her eye, its iridescence a small sun.
Her clean-picked skull’s a smooth rock
weathering lichen-yellow.
Her backbone ridge bisects
the dully bleaching fur now
clumped in hummocks matching
paddock grass beyond the fence.
V: Week Eight
Her bone fragments like stone,
pebbled vertebrae scatter over fur
and under autumn leaves, returning.
A thing dropped
into a clear pool will draw fish
seeking food.
So Dante and Beatrice were received
by ambitious hungry lights
in the second circle of paradise.
And so it is in limpid waves behind
the shore-break at Bar Beach – turquoise, just like
a circle of heaven on holy days
as the sun strikes sheer
through sea’s restless face.
Lucent sand whiting hang unseen
and I am drawn to light from
their flanks. Mirror-winks
from distant wreck survivors.
My keen heart-jolt flashes back
in answer.
Between breaths
garlanded with streamers
I follow their turn,
salt-blurred among
the weed-manes.
1
My favorite saint tells me I complain too often about my soul’s shortcomings, I’m
grateful
2
for the dreams I remember, W— pushes apart my thighs and asks in Punjabi
when I’ll finish, nothing in this world more beautiful than its share of tenderness
3
your body is denied, O soul, you’re the sum of tragedies I’ve had to invent
4
to circumvent the ones we inhabit, I need you because I’m the only loss
5
I’m comfortable with, you’re either something I must overcome or something I’ve
already failed to, I can’t
6
so I don’t think of you in the present, I lack the imagination
7
to change, what my favorite saint says I believe, although the soul knows its
wretchedness and knows what we are is
8
wickedness, what a great favor the Lord does us by sending us this distress the soul
must be occupied with
9
when I say I’m too simple-minded to understand your mysteries, I want you to tell me
10
I’m being disingenuous, you manifest most frequently when I awake with a puffy face
and a hangover
11
in the morning every regret is that one opening through which
12
the heavens belch a riot of blond cherubs, I can only think of my life as a sequence of
crucial refusals, cracks
13
down a wine glass, a line of riot shields too ready for me to overlook, tomorrow a
rainbow so faint it won’t register in pictures, I browse through a list of victims to
practice my outrage, without feeling, the world you’ve made
14
shall give me the next simile that conveys with poetic precision how little I think of
myself: I look around to make sure someone’s overheard me.
