It stretches past the vast windows

to the Domain, the Harbour, the Cahill

Expressway and its fugue of inner

urban motoring, all the way back 
to Nolan’s desert, posted with

Robert O’Hara Burke’s focusless eyes,

azure, intense, a mad cosmology

sitting in back, scanning the edgeless
horizon for anything – primed

for fellowship among the nation’s hopeless,

enbosomed causes: Ned Kelly, nude,
a trap-sprung hare on the gummed riverbank;

or, on horseback, carrying his rifle,

and affixed to a stamp, the cumulus 
pouring through his letterbox head;

or Ern Malley, ribs skeletal beneath

his uniform, epaulettes of the undead.

He’s poetry’s revenant. Above the yellow
ochre country and cranking machinery

of Pretty Polly Mine: is that the night

parrot, or a washed-out black cockatoo?

Its claws are colonial-era throwbacks,
curlicued iron lacework, obsolete contraptions,

repeated in the wire-frame weather-vane

atop Sheehan’s Agricultural Hotel.
And there – a great heron sifts yellow mud

along the banks of the pale broad murk

of the Murray. What’s it got its eye on?


Notes:

Based upon the work at Sydney Nolan’s 2007 AGNSW retrospective.